Kids These Days...--Repost

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash

I never thought I would be old enough, or old-fashioned enough to say 'Kids these days!' But Oh My God, kids these days! When these kids came out of the womb, their fathers were recording their entrance into the world on a smartphone. Then, before the baby had any toys, the mother had a phone that she seemed to love as much as she loved the baby. Babies are smart, they are not smartphones, but they know what's up. They may even think that the smartphone is their brother or sister since every single time mom or dad holds them, that damn phone is in one of their hands. They will drop the kid before they drop the phone.

I was tutoring a five-year-old girl who spelled 'where' with a 't' in it but knew every function of the iPad we were using. She would change the setting for writing on the iPad from pink highlighter to purple pen without even blinking. But when I asked her what she had learned about 'topics' she blinked, and blinked.

Millennials and everyone after that are living in a different universe than the one I grew up in. I played in the sandbox, now they play video games all day in front of a little box.  I ran on the grass, they are running in front of the T.V. on a Wii, a video game with fake grass. We had real live bullies at school, kids now have to deal with these bullies at home on their computers, iPads, and smartphones. They walk around town carrying a bullying machine in their hands.

If that's not ridiculous enough, I'm not sure they know how to play without gadgets in the room. Remember those games of pretend we used to play, for hours, with no props? I wonder if they could ever pretend to live in the world I grew up in as a kid. There were literally like five channels on the T.V. and no remote control. Can you imagine kids who now have a million trillion websites and channels to go through, living with just five channels of media? They would literally kill themselves. I wouldn't even do an experiment for that, because the kids would literally all be dead by day two.

Computers were for astronauts and alien robots in my day. Oh my god, when there are robots, will people remember what humans were once like? When we used to talk to each other face to face. This thing that's happening is going to get worse and worse. I don't really see an end to it, but can see an end to life as we know it. Soon robots will be cooking and cleaning and going to the bathroom for us.

We are not far from a time when they will chop down all the trees and replace them with oxygen machines. They will probably kill all the people and replace them with super-people, genetic mutants who will be taller and smarter, with their brains hooked up to the Internet.

This is how crazy I looked when I was fifteen.

But let's face it we are all in on this. I am writing this on my beloved Mac computer for a website that I started. Don't get me wrong, I'm just as invested in this insanity as anyone else. I'm worried that I'm addicted to my computer since I've been writing more, I even read on the kindle on the laptop. I have thought deeply about this, if and when my computer breaks, I will lose every password to every account that I have created. My computer is the only one who knows all my passwords, hell if I remember them. How am I going to start over? What will become of me? Who am I without my passwords? My entire web presence is based on them.

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is pick up my phone. Why? Do I think there is something special on there? I definitely don't assume that it's possible Trump did a smart thing overnight. I should do something more spiritual, something for the mind, body, soul first thing in the morning. Instead, I'm looking at a Facebook post where Kim Kardashian says she could possibly run for president. (Her eyebrows should run for president, that's her only quality.) I literally call and text my family while we are all in the same house.

I mean I understand that the world looks like it's ending, and it makes sense every morning to check the stats on that, but this has got to be unhealthy. We have an Amazon Alexa, but we haven't set it up yet. I'm honestly a little hesitant at this point. She will shut off the lights for me. Do I want to stop doing that for myself? I mean I think it's a cool concept and everything, that's why I bought the damn thing, but when it comes down to technology waiting on me hand and foot, I'm concerned about what kind of person I will become. I'm already lazy, could I possibly get any lazier?

What kind of person have I become? I laugh at my mom because it takes her half an hour to write a text. But I know the kids that I tutor are laughing at me every time I fumble on an iPad, which happens pretty often. My parents think I am a technology genius! Me, the woman who can't make an excel spreadsheet. But compared to them I am a genius. However, compared to the millennials, I'm an idiot who doesn't really understand Snapchat. It took me a decade to understand twitter.

I have a thousand and one apps on my phone, I don't know how to erase the ones I don't need. I don't even know how to stop getting news notifications on my screen every half an hour. My parents used to get angry at me for watching too much T.V. as a kid, now kids are staring at a screen probably 75% of their lives.

When was the last time they stared at a tree or played in the mud? They don't know how to spell because of spellcheck, they can't do arithmetic because they have never not had a calculator attached to their phone, which is attached to their body.

The saddest thing I think is that when I teach at the college, I notice that sometimes the hallways are silent but there are many kids hanging around. They are all staring at their phones instead of talking to each other. These kids have thousands of Instagram friends, but how many real-life friendships do they really have? They prefer to text or chat with someone online rather than have a face to face talk.

They post pictures of themselves filtered and altered and photoshopped, what do they think of themselves when they look in the mirror in the morning? I have 'Friends' on Facebook who seem like they have the most amazing lives, they are on vacation constantly. They have perfect families, and they run marathons every week. I'm not gonna lie, sometimes that makes me feel like shit. Like I have no life. I will also admit I have seen photos of parties I was not invited to and felt bad about myself.

This is a weird type of existence.

I mean the plus side is we have all this convenience and information at our fingertips. If we have an obscure question about a random subject, we can instantly find the answer with minimal effort. But the price of that is that we have given up on real life, on nature, on just sitting around and relaxing. We don't really do anything, when we are multitasking with our phone, computer, and T.V. all at the same time. We are really doing none of those things, even though we think we are able to do more.

Our mind is no longer in the room where other humans reside in front of us. I've been to dinners with friends who will spend a great amount of time on their phones instead of talking to me. I'm jealous of technological gadgets. I went to a wedding once and every single person at my table was looking at their phone at one point. Imagine how children feel when their parents are more interested in their phones and computers than their kids

For god's sake, we all know the president is sitting on his toilet at 3 a.m. tweeting out executive orders. Just to tell you how technology has changed my life professionally: I used to write and think that one day, years from now, someone will read this. Now I write something and literally the minute I'm done I can post it for the entire world to read. I think it changes how I write. This is changing my art and my heart.

I'm a different person than I was twenty years ago. Not just because I'm older. The world literally has changed.

Although we don't have flying cars and it doesn't exactly look like the future version of Back to the Future or The Jetsons, I think we were expecting a little more dramatic change. But this change is kind of enough.

I saw this Ted Talk about how the brain needs time to do nothing and be bored in order to think of creative thoughts. We literally don't take time to be bored anymore.

I want sitting on the front porch back. I want lively conversations over the dinner table back.

I want to still just sit by the dock of the bay, wasting time.

I want me back.

nina