Beginning sometime in your twenties you start to have moments where you go, “man, I’m OLD.” You start to notice that people you used to think were so grown up — eighth graders, the JV soccer team, college freshmen — all look like babies to you. You go to the mall and notice that what you wore as an adolescent is now “retro.”
This sort of thing has existed in human culture for a while, but it’s getting worse. Generation X, the current crowd to undergo this phenomenon, is probably going to suffer the worst of it, while Generation Y will be the first group to find it irrelevant. This is because Generation X is the only group whose lives will evenly span the pre-digital and post-digital age. GenX births are generally fall between 1965 to 1980, although people argue over exact dates. People born in these years were brought into a world that was much the same as that of their parents; there were fewer than ten television stations, nobody owned a home computer, and there was one telephone line, television, car, refrigerator, and career per family. But from the second they were born, the world around them began a profound leap in acceleration that, even given the pace of the past, is nearly impossible to believe.
Technology began at a crawl, took millions of years to come to a steady jog, but then suddenly strapped on a rocket pack and broke Mach 5. I’ll show you what I mean. Sometime before these dates, historians and anthropologists are fairly certain humanity had achieved:
| 1-2 million BC: |
stone tools, knives, controlled fire, cooking |
| 500-100k BC: |
shelter, clothing, spears, burial |
| 60k to 10k BC: |
boats, bow and arrow, mining, counting, sewing, rope, baskets |
| 8,000 BC |
alcohol, adobe, grain storage, metalworking, city walls |
| 6,000 BC |
animal domestication, dentistry, maps, woven cloth |
| 3,000 BC |
beer, wine, irrigation, ploughs, cities, bread, wheel and axle, ice skates, paving, canals |
| 2,000 BC |
plywood, writing, sailing, bronze, silk, cement, noodles, combs, buttons, soap, pyramids, chariots, toilets, money, alphabets, candles, skiing |
| 1,000 BC |
bells, swords, perfumes, coinage, water clock |
| The year 0 |
catapult, surgical tools, scissors, eye surgery, magnifying lens, anchor, sugar, kite, cosmetic surgery, aqueduct, encyclopedia, horseshoe, compound pulley |
| 500 AD |
central heating, paper, lanterns, toothpaste, spinning wheel |
| 1000 AD |
toilet paper, Greek fire, quill pen, distilled alcohol, valves, eyeglasses, metronome, syringe, gunpowder, paper money, sextant, coffee, woodblock printing, sherbet |
I’m not going beyond 1000 AD because you can see where it’s headed. The pace of technology sped up so much that today we can’t even envision what’s out there, let alone actually witness it. Innovations used to come at such a slow pace that any time one occurred, a new deity would usually be created just for the occasion. It’s hard to even imagine people from any longer than a few hundred years ago feeling “old” because of technological revolution in their lifetime.
Try to imagine it: a million years ago, some middle aged human dad went, “Man, I feel so OLD. When I was a kid we were just banging rocks together. But now we’re doing it inside a straw hut. My kids don’t even remember what it was like to bang rocks together outdoors. That’s it. Kids, come on. We’re going camping so you can learn how we banged rocks the old-fashioned way.” And before the kids could grunt “Ooga booga, Dad! I was going to go bang rocks under Grelnak’s palm fronds!!” there they were — getting a sunburn while using crude stone tools, just like in the old days.
Yeah right. Today, the dude who invented the Segway just announced that he’s invented a robot arm that makes Darth Vader-like prosthetics a reality. Did you hear about it? Are you surprised? Are you even impressed?
GenXers are now beginning to pass through the middle peak of life, and when they look at the kids currently entering college the overwhelming transformation of human life is crystal clear. Beginning this year, the kids going to college today have never lived in a world without the Internet. They have little to no recollection of life before the World Wide Web. They don’t know what it’s like to live without cable TV, home video game consoles, e-mail, surround sound, big screens, online shopping, and they barely remember the Web before social networking sites. They do not perceive much, if any, difference between virtual and actual identity. They have never called into a radio station to request a song, and they have never learned the craftsmanship that goes into making a mix of songs on a cassette tape. They have never used a floppy disk that was floppy, and they don’t know that you used to have to swap floppies in and out of your external drive every time you changed locations in a video game. They don’t even know what a Commodore 64 is, and the terms Oregon Trail, BASIC, boot disk, and prank calling means nothing to them.
From childhood to middle age, GenXers have lived an epoch of technological revolution. It’s the theory of relativity in action. The pace began to pick up when Apollo 11 reached the moon’s surface. When the Columbia lifted off. When the Challenger exploded. They reached maturity when the world logged on and plugged in, and they will live out the next forty to sixty years watching the transformation of the world be completed. Just as they begin to die out, they will see the world’s population peak at nine billion.
Those born after Generation X are so accustomed to the lightning quick pace that they no longer notice it, just passengers inside any moving vehicle no longer perceive motion once cruising speed is achieved. Like Einstein’s twins, those who travel at light speed come back younger than those from a slower frame of reference. Generation Y and those after weren’t around when the machine sped up, and Baby Boomers never got 100% on board for the ride. So all of that condescending commentary on the angst of GenXers back when we were in high school was off the mark. We weren’t bored or snotty; we had motion sickness. We are ancient and modern, with our lives riding the cusp between banging rocks together and mind-boggling science fiction become reality. We can see the bewilderment of the older generation and the complacence of the younger.
So when we say we feel old, there is nothing to laugh at. The sort of perspective we’ve been forced to have is difficult to deal with, and the god’s eye view we have of the magnitude of the changes in our world can easily leave you with vertigo. We will never live wholly in one world or the other, and like all gifts, it is also our curse.
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