Saturday, June 17, 2006
Lost in Time
I've begun to feel a bit like a lost time-traveler, one who has experienced a lot of history, but in a chaotic order. Some distant events seeming much closer than others, with some periods of my life seeming as though they happened to someone else altogether. Next month I will be 48 years old, and can imagine being 50 quite easily. And while I don't anticipate retiring anytime soon, I could join AARP in those two years hence, or start withdrawing funds from my 401K without penalty in seven.
This seems all the more odd to me, because I feel young, I think I look young (albeit with the aid of hair-dye) and am now married for the first time in my life (one year come November). Aging has become some weird game of roulette for me -- "Is this the year I begin to show my age? Start to slow down?" While I'm obviously aging some, maybe I'm aging more gracefully than most. Maybe I'm just blind to the slow deterioration going on in both my mind and body. My wife thinks my hearing is bad, though I don't know of anyone else that seems to think so. At times she thinks I'm a complete idiot, perhaps a sign of impending senility, but my mental lapses to me seem no greater than at any other time in my life, though I do now have more responsibility and a much greater scrutiny of action, i.e. a wife to make note of my missteps.
Maybe I should feel abandoned on the shoals of time, or like a fossil that is out of place in the modern world, but instead the future can't seem to get here quick enough for me. All around me are signs of a past that refuses to go away. Everyone seems to be listening to 70's and 80's music. I spend a lot of time at the local university Gym (I have an alumni membership) and it seems strange to me that all these 18-20ish something kids should be listening in large part to music recorded before they were born, or at least while they were in grade school. Yet they do it with stylish iPods and laptop-computers and other internet download devices. Technology seems to have taken a more introverted step into the future. Instead of a future with spaceships to Mars, flying cars, super intelligent computers, and totally autonomous robots eliminating human toil and suffering; we have hand-held this's and hand-held that's which allow us to silently escape to digital realms. The made-up worlds of online-gaming are filling up with the exodus of millions from the more mundane real world which seems to have quit evolving.
When I was eleven (1969), Man landed on the moon, the fastest plane ever (that we know of) the SR-71 Blackbird had been flying for 3 years, and the 747 was undergoing flight test certification. Cars were fast, air-conditioning common, most people had color TV. Now that we are on the verge of finally delivering a substantially better picture than analog TV with HDTV, it isn't viewed as some great leap forward, like radio, TV, and Color TV before it, but as some unneeded gimmick by most. By and large we've just grown use to the way things are, and would rather not go through the inconvenience of change.
The ways we work and play have all changed with the digital age, but seemingly little else. Then again maybe we are just on the brink, waiting for changes as profound to occur in our everyday lives as well. Maybe America has forgotten how to change. My visits to China have shown me a world that is use to change, hungry for change, and advancing at a pace that if sustained will leave America in the dust. Maybe America is just catching it breath after two centuries of headlong plunging into the future. Maybe America will enter a period of decline. Who knows?
My journey into the future continues.
