The World  Changes but so do We

The World  Changes but so do We

I occasionally look around and wonder when the world went crazy.

Things just aren’t the way they used to be.

Today, people don’t talk to each other. They stare at their phones. You call a business and spend ten minutes arguing with a computer that insists it understands what you’re saying when it clearly doesn’t. You repaired things that broke.

It is a simple truism that the world has changed (it always does). At my age, I often feel that it has not necessarily been for the better.

I remember three television networks. A telephone was attached to the wall. If you weren’t home when somebody called, they called back. They didn’t just text and be done with it.

As a kid, I rode my bicycle all over the neighborhood, and my mother had only a vague idea where I was. The basic instruction was to be home for supper.

Today parents can track their child’s exact location on a phone (which they increasingly seem to have at an unreasonably early stage of their development).

I’m not sure which system is better, but I’m reasonably certain my parents would have been horrified to know everywhere I actually went.

So yes, the world changed. I just didn’t change to match it.

I’m an analogue guy in a digital world. To prove my point, during my freshman year at Georgia Tech we used slide rules and programed via punch cards. My first computer was a decade away. Everything new is filtered through that juxtaposition.

When I was twenty-five, change was exciting. At seventy, I sometimes find it overwhelming.

When you’re young, a new way of doing something represents the future. When you’re older, your first reaction is often, “What was wrong with the way we were doing it?” That’s probably the same sentiment my parents felt about my generation.

We had long hair. We listened to rock music. We questioned authority. We thought we were modern. Our parents probably thought we were defiant (and wrong).

Now it’s our turn.

Every generation seems to make the same mistake. We assume the world we grew up in was the “normal” one. It wasn’t. It was simply the world that existed when we learned how things were “supposed” to work.

And “supposed to” becomes increasingly powerful as we age.

People are supposed to talk instead of text. Kids are supposed to play outside. Employees are supposed to go to work instead of sitting at home in sweatpants staring into a computer. A restaurant is supposed to give you a real menu not a QR code.

Except who decided that? Mostly, we did (as our parents had before us).

There are things about the old world that I genuinely miss.

Families seemed to spend more time together. Communities seemed more connected. We weren’t reachable every minute of every day. Children had more freedom to explore the world without adults organizing every moment of their lives. And we learned by the “school of hard knocks” (which frequently included real “knocks” and broken body parts).

Some of that was positive. We learned that the world wasn’t always a safe place and how to manage that.

But nostalgia has a way of cleaning up the past.

We remember children riding bicycles until dark. We don’t remember as fondly the cigarette smoke in every restaurant, cars without seat belts, or diseases that today can be prevented with a shot.

Nostalgia is a wonderful editor.

It keeps Christmas morning and throws away the root canals.

Still, I don’t buy the argument that every change is progress.

We have instant communication and seem to have more trouble communicating. We have access to almost the entire accumulated knowledge of mankind and use that technology to watch cat videos.

We have hundreds of “friends” we have never met. Families can sit around the same dinner table while everyone talks to somebody who isn’t there.

Something has been lost.

The difficult part is determining whether I’m mourning something that really mattered or simply something that was familiar

When I say I miss the world of fifty years ago, what exactly am I missing? The music? The cars? The simpler technology? Maybe.

But when I picture that world, I also picture a younger version of myself.

That world was full of possibility. My career(s) stretched out in front of me. My body generally did what I told it to do. There were places I hadn’t seen, things I hadn’t done and mistakes I hadn’t made yet. There were a lot more first times than last times.

Perhaps we don’t miss the past nearly as much as we miss ourselves in the past. That’s a harder thing to admit.

I don’t really want my 1976 Pinto back. By today’s standards it was unreliable, inefficient and probably wouldn’t protect me very well in a crash (in fact they tended to explode when rear ended).

But I’d take my 1975 knees back in a heartbeat.

Maybe that’s why every generation eventually believes the world is going downhill.

During my time at West Point, there was a saying when you looked down on the underclassmen, “The Corps (of Cadets) has…” Meaning the standards had slipped. They were simply skating by rather than toughing through it like we did. Of course, every Class had thought the same thing (even of us).

It is inevitable that we compare today’s world not only with yesterday’s world. We also compare today’s version of ourselves with yesterday’s. And that person was younger, tougher and leaner. But that’s not a fair fight.

The world isn’t going back. Nor should it.

My grandchildren will live in a world I can’t imagine, just as my grandfather couldn’t have imagined mine. They’ll embrace some changes I’ll never completely understand.

And someday, if they’re lucky, they’ll be sitting somewhere complaining about how much better things were when they were young.

I hope they remember something their grandfather finally figured out. The world really does change. Some of it for the better. Some of it probably not. But so did I.

And perhaps growing older gracefully isn’t about desperately trying to keep up with everything that’s changing. It’s about remaining curious enough to keep looking forward while being grateful for what is behind us.

Because maybe what we really miss about the old days isn’t the old days at all. Maybe we just miss being young in them.