Things just aren't like they used to be and I'm ok with that

As I watch my two sons grow up in the world it has become apparent that not everything is the same as when I was a child. Before you scoff and reach for your keyboards to proclaim "oh derr fred !!" Just be patient.....
Things have changed and are still changing at a great rate of knots I know that, but its not just technology that  the change has been applied to.

There are people whose entire job in life is to make everything you want either ready to go or almost instant.

It's the little things that I have noticed. Such as nowadays you only have to wait 90 secs for your porridge. Not only that it comes in 90 different flavours as apparently the old flavour of oats just doesn't cut it any more. My porridge used to be made in a pot, with whole unprocessed and unflavoured oats and took at least 10 mins.

image courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

Not any more...and it's not like rushing it will make it any better. To get oats to cook quicker they have beaten the life out of them. Therefore point of oats = Lost.

You used to buy the ingredients to make your pasta for dinner. Now you go to the freezer section buy the ready to go pasta meal and the claim is it's ready in 7 minutes. When did it become so onerous that the 14 minutes it takes to cook pasta is too long ?

Try telling a kid that their favourite TV show isn't on again until next week, they will just look at you and ask "Why ? haven't they filmed it yet ?" They just don't understand that the network wants you to wait until next week to watch again.

When the Simpson's first started to appear on commercial TV, you used to eagerly await until the next episode came out and it was then eagerly discussed the next day at school. People used to schedule their activities around these situations. In fact Grandpa on the Go used to tell me that he used to have to go to the cinema to get the next episode of his favourite shows.

But not anymore, everything is available all the time.

They live in a world that is literally instant.

They think that email is old and redundant.

They think instant messaging is pointless. They have gone back to the one thing that everyone has said is redundant - Telephone calls. Now days of course they call each other via Skype or a variant of -  but you get my point. They talk to each other just like we used to.
They also back this up with text but most of the time they are simply chatting as if they are right next to each other.

It used to be that the smartest people on earth really struggled to get jobs and adjust to societal ways, I remember reading about the guy who had the highest IQ in Australia. He couldn't get a job and had trouble associating with others. Nowadays Google gets them a bean chair and anything they want. It's a apparently a job requirement to be not able to get along with others.

Even though all these changes and drive to save time and effort are constantly evolving - I don't mind.
After all I don't actually have to take advantage of these changes. I have discovered that there are safe havens where the lost arts are till practiced. In fact they're encouraged.

So as I tune into the eighties on my radio and make porridge in a pot I remind myself that just because they have made things faster , they haven't made them any better............

image courtesy of simplyeighties.com