getting older
Sep. 24th, 2007 02:26 pm[ edit: This is not a 'I just had a birthday' post. I've been thirty-six since July. ]
I'm thirty-six.
Lately, when I'm asked my age, it keeps on coming out as 'twenty-seven'. This isn't a conscious attempt to deny my aging; it's something happening before any decisions. Usually I catch it before it actually gets said.
The world has changed around me. I've seen entire industries appear in my lifetime. They feel at once old and imposing, and new and ephemeral. But for all that my daily business is carried out on the Internet, it feels the same as it did when I was growing up in the seventies.
I've been listening to my mother trying to deal with my bitchy, frustrating, aging grandmother. And wondering, in the back of my mind, what will happen when it's my mom's turn to be the one who needs to have someone checking up on her daily to make sure she hasn't fallen down. Our stretched-out, isolating society leaves us rattling around in empty houses all by ourselves at the end of our lives. Will I be in a position to do something different for her when her body and mind start to fall to entropy? Or for myself?
Everything seems more arbitrary and ephemeral than it did, ten years ago. And seems more permanent at the same time. Something may be the hot new version of an idea, shiny and new - but if it's any good, in the next year it'll be cloned into ubiquity, and on its way to cliche and boredom.
I might as well be twenty-seven, for all the change the past nine years have had. Our gadgets are shinier if we're willing to go deep enough into debt. They don't work much better for the most part. Everyone's still trying to sell me the same useless shit, wrapped up in design trends that were novel two years ago.
The culture I live in feels more and more like an endless panoply of false novelty. Not actually new. Just "new". Where, metaphorically, is my flying car? Back in the eighties all the adults were jibbering in fear about the complexity of the computers I was growing up with, and telling each other the whole society was going to be paralyzed with "future shock". Twenty-five years later, nothing fundamental has changed. We're still running the same scams on each other. Alvin Toeffler was full of shit. So's Vinge.
Or maybe this is just the calm before the storm, the result of living in a failing empire being piloted headlong into fascism and fear by death-cultists and the usurers their prophet warned against; maybe unimaginable changes are around the corner once the world's energy bills all come due, once some new process turns our whole world inside out.
When I'm seventy-two, will my life be truly any different than when I was born? Or will it have been another thirty-six years of false novelty? And which one do I really, really want?
I'm thirty-six.
Lately, when I'm asked my age, it keeps on coming out as 'twenty-seven'. This isn't a conscious attempt to deny my aging; it's something happening before any decisions. Usually I catch it before it actually gets said.
The world has changed around me. I've seen entire industries appear in my lifetime. They feel at once old and imposing, and new and ephemeral. But for all that my daily business is carried out on the Internet, it feels the same as it did when I was growing up in the seventies.
I've been listening to my mother trying to deal with my bitchy, frustrating, aging grandmother. And wondering, in the back of my mind, what will happen when it's my mom's turn to be the one who needs to have someone checking up on her daily to make sure she hasn't fallen down. Our stretched-out, isolating society leaves us rattling around in empty houses all by ourselves at the end of our lives. Will I be in a position to do something different for her when her body and mind start to fall to entropy? Or for myself?
Everything seems more arbitrary and ephemeral than it did, ten years ago. And seems more permanent at the same time. Something may be the hot new version of an idea, shiny and new - but if it's any good, in the next year it'll be cloned into ubiquity, and on its way to cliche and boredom.
I might as well be twenty-seven, for all the change the past nine years have had. Our gadgets are shinier if we're willing to go deep enough into debt. They don't work much better for the most part. Everyone's still trying to sell me the same useless shit, wrapped up in design trends that were novel two years ago.
The culture I live in feels more and more like an endless panoply of false novelty. Not actually new. Just "new". Where, metaphorically, is my flying car? Back in the eighties all the adults were jibbering in fear about the complexity of the computers I was growing up with, and telling each other the whole society was going to be paralyzed with "future shock". Twenty-five years later, nothing fundamental has changed. We're still running the same scams on each other. Alvin Toeffler was full of shit. So's Vinge.
Or maybe this is just the calm before the storm, the result of living in a failing empire being piloted headlong into fascism and fear by death-cultists and the usurers their prophet warned against; maybe unimaginable changes are around the corner once the world's energy bills all come due, once some new process turns our whole world inside out.
When I'm seventy-two, will my life be truly any different than when I was born? Or will it have been another thirty-six years of false novelty? And which one do I really, really want?