One of my favorite comedians, Louis CK, has a little commentary about how noone is thankful for what we have now in our high convenience society. He talks about how back when he was younger, people didn’t just use credit cards to buy whatever they wanted. If they wanted money they went to the bank, and then when they spent all of it…well that was it. You couldn’t do any more stuff. Too bad. One of my favorite relatives, my grandfather, once told me to treat every opportunity as if I were in a foreign country. What he meant was to treat my opportunities like I wasn’t going to get them again.
It makes me think about what kind of changes I’ve seen in my short lifetime. Obviously, everything has centered around shrinking the world. At first people thought it would be by means of internet, but now it’s become something even bigger than that. Multipurpose devices have made it possible to capture our most intimate and precious moments, moments that used to disappear as soon as they happened. What’s crazier, these moments don’t just stay hidden in our fragile memories until we die, we can share them with anyone with access to one of a million ways to connect to the internet. The other huge breakthrough would probably be in social networking sites that make it unnecessary to ever say permanent goodbyes to people. In a sense, I guess all of these advancements make the world a less lonely place. The best humans used to be able to do was leave legacies, little half copies of ourselves, to prove we were here at one point. Now, we can leave legacies and effectively add our collective memories and moments to this thing called the internet for everyone to experience some day. It’s like The Giver, except less sad.
What I can’t help but think is that I don’t know if it’s worth it.
Before youtube or facebook came along, I remember appreciating TV time slots. When Dragonball Z got moved from 4:30 to 5:30, I nearly had a heart attack from being so happy. When I said goodbye to my friends who were moving away, I said “Hey see you never. I’ll miss you, keep in touch.” and we never did, and we sometimes kept in touch. It moved me to appreciate my friendships and times with people that much more. Now, though, I see everyone living as if today can be experienced tomorrow and I hate that I’m buying into it. Youtube makes it easy to just put things off, facebook tells me I’m friends with randoms I’ll never see again and records me in pictures with people I met that night and won’t remember the names of the next morning upon friend request.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we’re cheapening ourselves by making our most precious moments so accessible and convenient. We are the first generation to experience these changes firsthand, and I can see us transforming–taking for granted everything the generations before us held dear. What will happen to the generation after us that takes all of this in as normalcy. Do I want kids that will be so absorbed with updating the world with every little detail of their lives that they lose touch with what they’re naturally like? I don’t want my kids to be little drones who can’t enjoy things for themselves. Drones whose first compulsion is to report the highlights of their days to the collective facebook mind. Some things should be temporary and other things, I believe, should be enjoyed alone.
