I was thinking today about whether or not I was happy Living in the “now”. I think it probably goes without saying that I’m a sci-fi geek, and with that sci-fi geek I envision marvelous futures that I’d much rather inhabit, but I’m also smart enough to know that unless I was simply whisked away to them, or frozen in time a la Buck Rogers or Futurama, I probably wouldn’t appreciate them if I’d been born to them. I’m sure the grass is always greener…
But when I think about the stretch of humanity, our history going back the past ten thousand years or so, there’s no other epoch I’d rather inhabit – not even if we’re talking about idealized moments like the 50s or 60s, or party-eras like the 70s. There are bands I’d have liked to see, I’d have Loved to Live through the Moon shot, but each of those moments come with their negatives (it wouldn’t have taken me being born too many years earlier and I’d have been shipped off to Vietnam, Korea… coming to this age in the 50’s would’ve meant Living through – and surviving – two world wars)…
I think being born when I was and Living to now has allowed me to see some truly remarkable changes, and yet I remember enough of “how things were” for things like the internet and cell phones to still have a good solid aura of magic… despite still being young enough as these things have been introduced that I’m (mostly) adapting to them pretty well.
It’s incredible to watch movies like Apollo 13 and realize that sending people to the Moon wasn’t that long ago (my father was involved – so just a generation) and yet we didn’t even have pocket calendars (the scene where everyone whips out a slide rule is simply mind-bending) or “real” computers yet – and of course it’s been long enough that 1 in ten Americans believe the whole thing to be a hoax…
Now don’t get me wrong, the last couple of years have been kind of shitty. I’m aware of it both as a part of me simply getting older, and also as one of those cycles where tensions and tempers run high. But I think that 2014 (at least) was pretty amazing and the world is only going to get (unevenly) better.
Hell. I just solved a problem with a tone generator. In the 90s I’d have had to go visit a college or something to use theirs cause it would’ve been too expensive for me to have just lying around. Today I downloaded one for free on my phone in under 60 seconds. (cue angry emails from impoverished makers of tone generators who can’t afford their formerly lavish lifestyles…)
I could roll with being a couple of years younger (Hell, I’d be happy being 15 years younger, but I mean per “appreciation of the world”-wise) – but being born much later means that I wouldn’t have the perspective of having Lived through the latter years of the Cold War, which I think is kind of an important part of understanding the world today.
And to many years after that and suddenly you start taking the world as it is for granted.
Fuck that noise. I think it’s really cool that the world’s so impressive.
