Oh, humanity. Our generation stands at a unique point in history. We did not give birth to it, but mine and maybe my sister three years younger than I are perhaps among the last to say their elementary school pockets were filled with, and not to the brim, with a couple dollars and change I refused to let go of, including the pennies, some candy, some bubble gum with a zebra on it and not much else. No cell-phones, no iPods. Maybe a Disc-Man if we were lucky. We had so much time, and if you were a dork like me with not many friends you had a lot of time to yourself. Time to wander and explore, eyes open and darting to and fro while your legs carried you to where you wanted to go. We listened to music on the radio, not because we particularly liked it, but because we couldn't afford new CDs.
There was this new fandangled thing called the Internet that you could send mail by. But back then it was just yesterday that we were sitting on Dad's lap in his super comfy leather desk chair as he explained the marvels of Windows 93 and new games on floppy disk, and we soaked it up like a sponge. But you cold only play these games for so long. Where we really played was outside, in the grass, running through the sprinklers; or at the park building tunnels in the sandbox.
We didn't live vicariously through others. We lived our own lives in our own time. We got voicemails on an answering machine at home, and when the phone rang, everyone would race to answer it, and we only knew who it was if we recognized the number.
[a bat-shit crazy person once said, "The things you own end up owning you."]
Now we screen calls based on if we want to talk to the person calling us, but a lot of times we'd rather just text. And should a cell-phone go misplaced, then heaven forbid. What would the world come to if we didn't have a cell phone for a day? A week? If we couldn't sign into Facebook for a year? How many people would just loose it in a fit of conniptions? Never in the span of a twenty-two year old's lifetime have we come so far and achieved so little. In 1968 people walked on the moon, and by that meter their projections for the future seemed endless. By 2001, they were going to be flying their cars and embarking on space odysseys. They had a sense of wonder and excitement for that which they hadn't seen. Did they have cell phones in this future? Of course not. Maybe transponders.
Did they have laptops in this future of theirs? Pftph. What the fuck was a laptop? They were merely traveling between the stars.
I was catering an event not a month ago. It was an office party at some tech firm. I asked what they did specifically. A managerial looking woman answered me excitedly. "We're developing touch screen technology that incorporates multiple fingers at one time. There are millions of dollars worth of investment locked in research and development alone. It's really quite amazing."
Why? Because it's the future.
