Seventy-two years of life gives a person a great deal to reflect on. Life in the 1940s and 50s was far less complicated in contrast to the dawn of the Twenty-first Century. In the mid 1990s a work supervisor commented that, “today more decisions are made in a single day by each individual than was made during a month one hundred years ago.” Perhaps I don’t have the exact numbers correct but the point was how the stress level in people today is so much greater than it was a hundred years ago due to all the choices that must be made each and every day.
At first glance this may be far-fetched but after some consideration it really does make a lot of sense. For those of you born after 1970 there would not be as noticeable a drastic change since the decades prior. Each year we see technology accelerating at exponential rates. The 1980s introduced the personal computers to the world of consumers, though not too attainable at first. By the turn of the century most every home had at least one computer. Communications have skyrocketed with the onset of the cellular phone. Digital recordings, aka CDs, were replacing vinyl LPs and cassette tapes. Cable TV was increasing in number of channels and programming. Then satellite hit the scene with its myriad channel offerings. The internet has probably become one of the greatest invasions into our lives of all the technology as almost everything is now done “on line”- research, shopping, surfing, chatting, telephoning, watching television programs and movies, “downloading” music and other entertainments offerings. There’s no end, or even slowing down, of all of this in sight.
All this was way beyond the imagination back in the 1940s through the 1960s. Color TV was a luxury up until the mid-1960s and even then it was about 50% of the households having it. (Sorry, I’m not sure about the statistics. Please bear with me as I’m painting a picture, not giving a factual report with numbers.) We were lucky to have three TV channels to choose programming from. Cable was coming in during the 1960s, but the channel selection was rather limited. If you had 15 channels to select from it was phenomenal.
Now the decisions begin to become more prolific. Which programs do I want to watch? I can’t decide which of the two programs to watch at 8:00 tonight – is it going to be Mannix or the Andy Griffith Show? Of course we can now set the DVR to record multiple programs at the same time to view at our leisure. So technology has advanced to make life easier for us, but has it really? Yes, in some ways, but it has come at a price. When is the best time to buy, as the latest cell phone is obsolete the day after you make your purchase? Then you kick yourself because if you had only waited another week you would have bought the new one with the latest gizmo that you cannot live without.
And so it goes. When I was growing up most of my time was spent with the family together. The kids played together, ate our meals around the dinner table and our outings were always as a family. The toughest choice we had to make was whether to play Red Rover or Kick the Can. It was not difficult to plan the following day’s activities because they rarely changed from day to day. Get up, eat breakfast, do your morning chores, go to work/school, etc. No stress having to figure out the families varying schedules, juggling the day’s calendar to fit all the appointments and whatever else our modern times may toss our way. Ah, for the simple life. To have real, live friends to interact face-to-face with. It was good to be able to say howdy to your neighbor sitting on the porch next door. I think you get the idea.
Well, it’s nice to know I now have many friends that I can while away the hours with. The only problem is I don’t know what they look like or how they sound. And I haven’t been able to learn their body language or the dynamics of their speech. What am I missing here?
So much for my musings this time, sleep deprivation has gotten the better of me. Take some time to reflect upon your past and compare it to now. Shalom.
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