New Coastie – Tech trials

Sometimes I feel everything is changing too fast. I am a millennial. Three years ago my age cohort and our place in society was all the rage in conversations, newspaper articles, and jokes. It seemed everybody hated us because we were allegedly weak and entitled. Today the subject of public malign in the culture is Generation Z or the Zoomers. 

I find myself complaining about the “new generation” and their “laziness” and “screen time” so much that I have to deliberately check myself. Am I being a hypocrite? Just a few years ago I did not like it when I was being complained about by the older generations. Am I just jealous and should get on with the times?

After a few months of self-reflection, I have come to this conclusion: there is some validity to our complaining. Hear this young old man out. For decades we had a landline and an answering machine, and a couple of TV channels. That is all we had through the 60s, 70s, 80s and much of the 90s. We remembered phone numbers, carried pens, and got the news the next day. We were happy with that. The pace of change was manageable. The phone can go in multiple rooms? Fantastic. Call waiting? Sign me up. No more rotary on the phone, and you can just press the numbered buttons to call someone? Yes, let’s do it. 

Fast forward to 2022. I have a powerful supercomputer in my pocket which can get me anything I want in a second. Groceries, clothes, gadgets, conspiracy theories – all within reach from my own couch. And the pace of this change, my God! Consider social media. I sign up to Facebook – get on Twitter, old man. I download Twitter – get Snapchat you dinosaur. I build a profile on Snapchat – Instagram is where it’s at granddad. Reddit, Tik Tok, Watsapp, Wechat, Telegram, it goes on and on. Everything can be done with an app. All this development within a very short span of time. Give me a minute to catch up! Humans evolved over millions of years. Our brains are not really equipped to deal with this pace of change. 

There are many positives of these developments. The new generation is very socially aware, climate conscious, open to change and overall the most open minded to race, sexuality/gender, religion and nationality. Technology has improved global health and global human connectivity. 

However, while living your life and running your business, if you get ridiculed for not being “up with it” or overwhelmed by the fact that now you have to put yourself on Tik Tok when you just signed up to Instagram, just take a breath, have a little winge and a whine. We deserve to do that. Not everything has to be adopted right away. I completely skipped Pinterest, and my life did not get ruined. 

Our ancestors whined about us, we deserve to complain about our descendants occasionally.