Stick Shift Demise. It's not what you think. - 17 July 2026

I received the below WaPo piece today from my friend, John Galt, a fellow motorcycle rider.

The death of the stick shift is almost here

The demise of the stick shift is a small but telling symbol in the mass dumbing-down of America. Intellect and accomplishment are being pushed ever higher, concentrating at the apex of a steepening pyramid. Brighter minds cluster at the top, while below them spreads an exponentially widening base of lesser capability... characterized by automatic transmission and adaptive cruise control drivers. This growing cognitive chasm is poised to create profound dependency for the lower three-quarters of the population and concentrated power for the top quarter.

Within our children’s lifetimes, the old patriarchal, nuclear-family, freedom-loving culture is set to dissolve. The Wachowskis, it seems, were prescient: we are sliding into a Matrix-like reality where the many become passive passengers and the few steer the system.

Yet this may not be a tragedy in the grander scheme. What feels like cultural decay could instead be a painful evolutionary contraction — the compression of human consciousness before a leap. Our mere 30,000 years of recorded “civilization” may prove to be only the first shaky step on an exponential stairway toward truly understanding the cosmos. If the price of cosmic awakening is the end of manual transmissions and traditional ways of life, humanity might one day look back and call it a bargain.

SDT

PS.   For now I plant myself firmly in the here and now. The stick-shift thrills surge through me like lightning on my two motorcycles: 2021 Ducati Multistrada V4; 2023 Honda Goldwing.  Every ride becomes a living, breathing dance—calculating revs, upshifting and downshifting through gears, while executing lean after lean into the curves, the road rising up to meet me as if it were alive. 
Yet, despite the article's forecast of the demise of stick shift cars, the fire hasn’t died for the great manual automobiles still prowling the asphalt: the razor-sharp BMW M3, the legendary Porsche 911, and the thunderous Cadillac CT5 Blackwing—pure, unfiltered high-performance beasts that still refuse to surrender the raw joy of the clutch and stick.