Before she passed, I used to talk to my grandma all the time about this stuff. She was born in the depression & almost made it to 100. Only about 20 years prior, the Wright brothers made their first flight. She went through WWII, the Jet Age, and the trip to the moon to Facetiming with us every Sunday & using Alexa as her assistant & audiobook reader. When my grandpa passed away, she stepped up her technology game & learned how to use a computer, a color printer, a flat-screen TV, and a Roomba.
I was born in the early 80's & am in the mid-gap "Oregon Trailster" generation, where we were the first batch of kids to get computers in schools & play the Oregon Trail video game on them. When I got into middle school, they had just dropped shop class in favor of technology class - my grade was the first to take the course! I learned how to type in 7th grade (very painful, but it worked!), which sort of set the foundation for a lot of my future opportunities. I later did a job in audio transcription & the ability to type fast has provided some really incredible opportunities for me over the years.
I went through a minimalist phase using technology that still has a foothold in my life where I digitized my music, movies, paperwork, books, photos, you name it! We have a wall-mounted Roku TV with a zillion shows on it. My iPhone does 90% of my computing these days. Last year, I picked up a jumbo iPad & Pen and do the majority of my creative work & art on it, using it to control vinyl-cutting machines, 3D printers, CNC machines, and laser machines. I have an Instant Pot & an Anova Precision combi-steam oven that does the majority of my cooking. I remember being so bored as a kid I wanted to claw my eyes out, and now TikTok exists to teach you anything you want to know instantly & entertain you with a spectrum of niches. Anything you want to learn is at your fingertips with Google, Youtube, and Wikipedia. Anyone you want to talk to about any topic you can dream of is on Facebook groups, Reddit, and Discord.
My nephews have grown up with wi-fi & 3G everywhere they've ever gone. There's no loading of tapes or DVD's or CD's, they just click on Netflix or ask Alexa to launch Hulu. They don't have to wait to save up for Legos because Minecraft gives you unlimited free blocks with mods, worlds, skins, and programming available. They can talk to their tablets using the highly accurate speech-to-text system to send their parents messages or video-chat me whenever they have a tech question. Enormous amounts of games are available for them through the app store. They can stream Xbox, Playstation, and Steam anytime they want to their mobile devices or big-screen television sets. Sceptre sells 50" televisions at Walmart for $199 on sale these days. Walmart even sells decent laptops for $299.
I eventually came to the ideology that, for the most part, I self-limit my happiness, and that aside from the effort I'm willing to consistently put into improving & maintaining my lifestyle,
my attitude determines the bulk of my enjoyment. We live in a golden area of accessibility & information. The average grocery store stocks over 42,000 items; strawberries are available in the dead of winter for $6. We have over 14,000 unique jobs available with nearly 7 million job openings right now. Over 2.2 billion iPhones have been sold worldwide. Self-driving cars are inching closer to reality. The Internet makes education in virtually any domain yours for the taking, whether it's working on your car or your plumbing or cooking or learning how to draw or anything. MIT has OpenCourseWare available, as do zillions of other websites with various learning resources.
And today I learned that they found multiple historical huts made entirely out of Mammoth bones in Russia. Just look at the progress we've made...I don't have to be a farmer or a hunter, all I have to do is pop open the Uber Eats app & someone will buzz some burgers over to my house in twenty minutes. Absolutely insanity.
arstechnica.com
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