I don’t exactly know how to say it but people now don’t LIVE in the way that people did fifty years ago. Children don’t have the same insatiable curiosity and I am hearing small rumblings indicating that some young people are already tired of the constant barrage of technology. I know I am tired of it, I find myself daydreaming of a place with no TV, no computers, no cellphones, in fact not even any electricity.
My wife and I can access more television “channels” than existed in the entire world when I first saw a television but there is very little that I find interesting any longer.
I actually began noticing a long time ago that some people were so obsessed with taking still pictures and videos of events that they missed the actual event. Everyone acting as if they had been hired to film a wedding or something. I practically stopped taking any kind of pictures long ago when I realized how many hundreds of slides and prints I had accumulated, some of them very good if I do say so myself, that were just occupying space in a closet with no one ever looking at them. People take so many pictures now that they defeat the whole purpose of taking pictures, if you have one good picture of something it might be worth looking at but if you have a thousand second rate pictures no one is interested. What is the point of a lot of pictures that people look at a week after the event and then never look at them again?
That's true in my world too. I work with two sorts of birders: those who must stop, get out the camera, and clumsily capture every bird on film... And those who simply enjoy capturing the moment of spending a short time with a beautiful, wild bird, and observing it.
I will never understand the camera people. It defeats the purpose of seeking the wilderness experience in the first place.
Agree, but I don’t think I want to go without electricity. After taking a direct hit from a hurricane, I was without electricity, gas, and water for nearly two months... and it was pretty miserable.
But I sure find myself wistfully pondering back to those times before the internet, satellite/cable-tv, cell-phones, and the like. The different “tone” life used to have, in terms of the culture, the day-to-day living, the way people used to interact with one another. I used to drive my grandfather to the barber shop, hardware stores, feed stores, and such, and observe all the social interplay. The whole texture of things. I’ve really begun to fully comprehend how extinct that peculiar element has become, and how much I miss it.
Nowadays, I look to when I recently went to get an oil change, and see seven people in the waiting area, all wearing dark clothing, riddled in tattoos, and staring blankly into the smartphones in their hands, totally immersed. All seven of them. Like raggedy zombies. Just seemed so bleak and depressing. It’s such a bizarre cultural change.