I saw a typical winter photo of my house 21 years ago. You could only see half of the house because of the deep snow. Although just 3 Decembers ago we saw 46 inches of snowfall in 12 hours, winters producing what used to be the normal amount of snowfall are extremely rare. Ironically, summers and autumns that produce catastrophic levels of rain are replacing them.
In 1977 the great minds were warning us that the earth was entering another ice age. ABC News, In Search Of, with Leonard Nimoy, what were you thinking?
The contrast between what was and what we now have are so many. It is something I feel all of the time. Maybe I am making it about me, but I believe that my grandparents, even though they too saw great contrast over the decades between earlier and later years, what we see now has become severe contrast, although my Grandmother seeing the first horseless carriage (automobile) drive into town compared to the moon landing may beg to differ!
I was sitting in Ms Magette’s typing class in 1982. The lesson content was business course-themed. Those lessons droned on and on for a miserable 378 pages about how automation would change the world I was living in. My life was going to become more leisurely it boasted! My parents’ generation went to work in massive factories and worked 40 to 60 hours a week. I would not have to worry about that. Machines would work for me while I drove around in convertibles and sipped frosty drinks.
No one ever told us that technology would make us more stupid. Despite humanity being able to survive thousands of years without documenting every insignificant detail of our existence, we suddenly felt the need to do so. What is the price for doing that? We not only dodged the leisure time bullet but also stole the simple life that our parents lived in which despite their busy weeks, somehow allowed us to have more time with each other. We know it started with that hopeless little screen which has evolved into giant screens and more little ones.
Is the remote work experience as rich as the one we used to be present? We are seeing things fading from existence and it can be easy to blame remote working for the corrosion, but I suspect it has less to do with that than our collective trajectory.
Don’t even get me started on TV Dinners. Yes, it’s a great song (although maybe acquired taste) from the depths of the 1983 Eliminator album by ZZ Top. Let’s go back to those days when the Swanson TV Dinner came in a foil tray. It came complete in compartments with 2 pieces of battered chicken, carrots, and a mashed potato sickle in the shape of a triangle, making it perfect for scooping out and throwing into the trash. If you got the good one, maybe a blueberry pie section too.
I may have a distorted memory of this, but I do not recall those being as ridiculously bad as the frozen dinners of today. I mean all of them! They do not even register as food for me. Cause I try, and I try, and I TRY! NO! What on earth is in these things? What happened? Why is everything so facsimile?
We are not able to stop the deterioration. It is like the “Can’t Help Myself by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu” art exhibit where a machine desperately tries to retain its lifeblood the hydraulic oil that allows it to move and live only to fail in the end. The arm slowly stopped then died in 2019. Even more devastating, the arm ran on electricity, not hydraulics. It was programmed to believe it needed the hydraulic fluid to survive. Nothing demonstrates the situation today with nearly everything as this does.
How does cooking become a spectator sport, with more training than ever piped into our homes when all the while, as a people, we eat more food that is processed, packaged in cardboard in which if we were to eat the box, would not taste much different from the contents?
Technology has certainly come so far and there is a beautiful arc of common sense woven into it as well. It would seem that we have traded medical and technological advancement for stress, anxiety, and apathy.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Here is the problem, all the while, it is a distraction. That thing that takes you away from what is really important. Pacification is woven deep into the matrix now, how could you ever break free of the time-suck that envelopes all of us in a gelatin-like paralysis?
Give the people what they want, and then you can give them whatever you want so you can get whatever YOU want right? I was there! When the whole world was immersed in its pre-millennium email chains of inane adolescent and condescending humanitarianism, I was there, knowing something was off! It was the culmination of sitting in the desert a decade before and knowing that eventually food, water, and fuel would arrive, but only when they decided it would.
Somewhere along the way, I drew a heavy line in that sand and said, no more. We do this my way. I sure hope that this is the gift I have given my children. No one is coming to the rescue. Not only do we make a difference, we call the shots and that makes us, ungovernable. The only way to play is to smile and act like you are taking the pill. High speed, low drag, that is the way to do it. Drones we are, and as we drive away, the desert floor holds the pills you all thought I took. Salute that.
Core family needs. Those who build a fine man or woman who knows who they are and show the people they love how important they are have not changed. They were this way in 1908, 1914, 1945, 1947, 1965, 1969, 1970, 2003, 2006 and today. Play with all of this other stuff all you want, you have not done anything.