Monday, September 7, 2015

Amusing Collaboration

Elder dumb is maybe another way to spell ..elderdom, which we associate with wisdom.  Experience and old age will outsmart youth and skills, except that today those skills of youth are from a cyberworld more bizarre than anything we could have imagined.  We are totally dependent literally, for every 'bit' of our lives on this same youth walking down the sidewalk staring at the screen oblivious to traffic, dog leashes, traffic lights or the very attractive lady going the other way with her text...maybe their eyes met on the screen?

Ever expanding technology with ever more complicated programming and updating and hardware shrinking and texting and wi-fi, on and on and on....they spend their entire lives interfacing with this web of incredible complex apps and chats and facebooking after a bit of twitter from server to google and bing, more than you would ever have known about anything random, is there before your eyes, with so many distractions that Aldoux Huxley would scream, "I told you so..."

     And then there's the 'baby boomers' coming off their productive labor years where we were forced to learn this technology, but are about to vomit over Windows 10.

    The state of being older....seniorityism, the pre-tired years, when we can still stand upright, click a mouse with some certainty, pull weeds, and fix food.  And wonder how we got to be here, now, watching our mother planet erode life forms by over-exploitation of the resources needed for a balanced web.
    Born with the ptsd of WWII in our genes, and then the hidden panic attacks for food in the depression, we were already stocking up for the Nuclear Explosion that would result from the Cold War. As children we would hear the sirens, crawl under our desks, or head for doorways, as if the imagery we saw of atom bombs gave us any hope we could ever survive that...
     It does seem humans need a catastrophic vision of the future, and certainly the current one, global warming, climate change, C0 2, etc. etc. mass extinctions, increasing desertification, and on and on, give me a feeling of nostalgia whenever I still see a protected reserve of land or river where I can still cultivate my ignorance of the 'ether' world and search for meaning by sifting through pebbles, watching a praying mantis, or finding a small ripe tomato on the vine. 
    I guess this is called 'retirement' although I'm confused how re-tired is more than being tired over and over already...and retirement could mean disconnecting from this obsessive compulsive medium of communication.