Living Life in Fast Forward

A gentleman who writes another blog I read posted a great thought piece the other night that waxed nostalgic. For those of you who don’t choose to click through and read it, here’s the last, and for the purposes of my post, most pertinent part:

But I cannot allow myself to think of Mattel Electronic Football, or the AM/FM stereo/cassette player Walkman, or the 64Kb computer as 25+ year-old relics, for to admit that they are relics, so must I admit am I.

And I just can’t do that.

Proof positive, friends, that we are living in accelerated times.

In my opinion, because after all, that’s all we have, rapid advances in technology are aging us faster than any previous generation. As the world around us, our society, and even the means by which we interact with other human beings all continue to change and evolve at the speed of Microsoft, we as humans flail after something that gives us status, that reaffirms our standing in this speeding continuum we call time on steroids.

We reach out to one another to validate our existence through cultural touchstones and mutual experiences, just as our parents did, and their parents before them. But these days, those milestones are merely feet apart. Whereas our parents can mark time by who was the first on their block to get a TV, and it was YEARS before it was traded in for a color set….our generation marks the passage of time in Atari, Nintendo, Playstation, and X Box.

As each division marks smaller passages of time, we become more exclusive and exclusionary as a society. These days, we reach backwards for those moments of validation, and when someone can not share that with us, we’re quick to draw a line between us. Again, to go back to 1981, I’ll never forget the first time I met someone who didn’t remember the assassination attempt on President Reagan. It made me feel old, yet at the time I was in my mid-20s, she was 19. The older we get, those years will make little difference, but in an attempt to establish ourselves as citizens in good standing, deserving of our opinions based upon our time on this earth, we begin to separate ourselves. Eventually we end up in rather homogenous company, wondering why we feel so old, never acknowledging that we did it to ourselves all as part of an attempt to stay young by keeping up with the rapid advances of technology and therefore of life.

So, 25 year old technology may be a relic – in tech terms only. In human terms, if you ask me, it’s a cherished piece of the RECENT past.