Positive Cynicism – A childhood free of technology
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“I’m so thankful I had a childhood before technology took over.”
Somebody was throwing that around on social media last week, and over 90,000 people agreed.
All 90,000 of you are idiots. Every last one.
Unless you were born centuries ago, you are idiots. That’s it. Period. End of sentence.
Especially the person who posted it, who is nearly 20 years younger than I am.
This is one of the most annoying things about human beings: the selective memories of the past. “Oh, well, my life was simpler and I feel I was more engaged in the world than kids are today, so my generation was The Last Good Generation.”
Ugh. Do you ever get tired of this shit?
You didn’t have a childhood before technology “took over.” No one living did. Sure, maybe you went to camp or even played outside or something, but technology still ruled your life. It probably made your childhood better. I know it did mine.
I was born in 1976. My childhood was dominated by the Atari 2600, Steven Spielberg movies, Saturday morning cartoons and Michael Jackson records. I was obsessed with Star Wars and the Space Program. I saw Halley’s Comet when I was 10 through a powerful telescope. I went to the library and checked out books printed on a real press. I played outside, and then I came inside to eat processed meats and Twinkies. I went camping with flashlights and drank Pepsi, which you’ll notice comes in a can that has been pressurized. We drove to campgrounds in cars and listened to the radio while I played with my Speak ‘n’ Spell in the backseat. I called my friends on the phone (or on walkie-talkies) to come over so we could try to build a race car with parts from an old vacuum cleaner engine. We put dishes in the dishwasher and made coffee in a percolator. We had toasters and microwaves and VCRs, played with our Transformers while watching MTV all day, and lived in a house with central air conditioning.
You may recognize nearly all of that as stuff that only happens because technology is a thing that exists.
Sure, we didn’t have the Internet and smart phones and HD, but that doesn’t mean my childhood was a quaint time that I spent having a lot of social interaction with peers while we, I don’t know, stood around and talked about farming, or something.
Technology made my childhood better. In fact, it enabled me to have one. I didn’t have to hitch up wagons to go anywhere. I didn’t have to do laborious chores for hours a day and work myself too hard just to eat. I had clean drinking water and vaccines and regular physical check-ups. I had a wealth of information available to me that previous generations didn’t have, simply because of cable television and computers and the way computers made it easier to borrow books from not just my library, but an entire library system.
And now someone 15 years younger than me thinks she had a childhood free from technology? Excuse me? How many DVDs were in the house when you were a kid?
Technology has made information easy to find. It’s made entertainment easy to procure. It’s made it possible to connect with people all over the globe in mere instants. And technology makes it possible to develop other technology more quickly. We have electric cars now. We have satellite phones. We have missions to Mars. We have more advanced prosthetics than at any other time in history. We have freaking Avengers movies.
Look, sometimes technology can be used for bad things. We have fracking, drone warfare, a weird fetish for making guns more and more capable of greater and greater slaughter, OKCupid and Justin Bieber mp3s. And yeah, we have a lot of people who waste their time on the Internet. Technology is a tool, and it can be used for all sorts of nonsense, just like all of the rest of our tools.
But technology has made it easier to strive for more. It’s made it possible for us to uncover the way the universe works. It’s made it easier to raise children who live longer. Aren’t you lucky? You don’t have to chase down an animal just to eat. Technology has made food so available that you can even choose not to eat animals at all. It’s given you a wealth of choice in just about every aspect of life.
You had a childhood before technology took over? Of course you didn’t! No one alive at this moment in time did. The fact that you have electric lights and don’t die from preventable diseases proves that.
You shouldn’t be “glad” that you had a childhood “before” technology became prevalent (which you didn’t). What you should be is ashamed that this wealth of technology hasn’t been spread around more throughout the rest of the world, so that everyone’s childhood has clean drinking water and vaccines and internet and HD and electric cars and, if you must have them, Justin Bieber mp3s.
“I’m so thankful I had a childhood before technology took over” is a pretty privileged thing to say, especially when it’s just flat out untrue and unrealistic. And stupidly ironic considering you said it on social media.
Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com
Aaron – Enjoyed reading your point of view and i almost agree with you too. Golden age of anything is when i was there. We all believe that don’t we.Like you said “we are the last good generation” . I said i almost agree with you – almost because your point of you is from a rich western world outlook. Some of the technologies you mentioned that you enjoyed in your childhood in the early 80’s were not there in many of the ‘developing worlds back then. Hell many countries don’t have them even today. So some of us born in the 70’s in a world different to yours can say that we were not inundated with technology in our growing up years like a gen x is.
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It sounds almost like you are being a little bit deliberately obtuse. I think you know that “technology” in this context is widely used to mean smart phones, etc. , and you know that the lament you are decrying here is one of alarm at the way today’s technology allows kids to be plugged in to the cyber world in a way that the technology you and I grew up with never allowed (I was born in ’76 as well). To call people who said “I’m so thankful I had a childhood before technology took over” “idiots” is to focus compulsively on how these people said something while ignoring the larger truth to what they meant. I don’t know if you have a teenager in your life, but I have a 16 year old stepson, and have seen first-hand the illusion of interpersonal connection that technology and its constant connection to social media, texting, etc. have created. Used to be, we’d get lonely and bored and need a change of scenery, so we’d call up friends to hang out at each others’ houses, or go somewhere, but kids don’t get lonely and bored when they are alone in their rooms anymore, because it seems to them that they are interacting with others, and I guess they are in a remote, digitally mediated way, one that pales in comparison to face-to-face interaction. I’ve seen Millenials just a few years older than his cohort, who grew up on all this stuff, but are slightly more social because the technology wasn’t quite as good in their formative years, out at bars. A couple months ago on an outdoor patio bar on a gorgeous night, I saw a bunch of them all sitting together in a group, but none of them were making eye contact or having complete conversations with each other, because they were all on their phones, texting other people or posting where they were on Facebook or some such crap. There are autistic people who have better social skills than this. The kids who have had an iPhone in their hand since 5th grade are going to be even worse. They don’t know how to live in the moment. And change of scenery? I’ll bet you, like I was, were chomping at the bit to get down to the DMV on your 16th birthday so that you and your friends could kick off the dust of suburbia and go into the nearest city and see and do things, but my stepson turns 17 in two months and he has yet to get his learner’s permit, and I have talked to more and more parents whose kids are in the same boat. They don’t have the same motivation to get out and see the real world, because they have such an interesting little world in an LCD a foot from their face.
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