Nine Things That Will Disappear In Our Lifetime

1. The Post Office
Get ready to imagine a world without the Post Office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the Post Office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.

2. The Check
Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with check by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the Post Office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the Post Office would absolutely go out of business.

3. The Newspaper
The younger generation simply doesn't read the newspaper. They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.

4. The Book
You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book. And think of the convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can't wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you're holding a gadget instead of a book.

5. The Land Line Telephone
Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they've always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell provider for no charge against your minutes.

6. Music
This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today is "catalog items," meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with. Older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, "Before the Music Dies."

7. Television
Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they're playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I say good riddance to most of it. It's time for the cable companies to be put out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and through Netflix.

8. The "Things" That You Own
Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in "the cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest "cloud services." That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That's the good news. But, will you actually own any of this "stuff" or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big "Poof?" Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.

9. Privacy
If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7, "They" know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits. "They" will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again.

Ten years ago my friend got a job out of college working for the Yellow Pages selling ads. I told him to get a new job. The only thing the yellow pages were good for was starting fires.

My mailman hates me already because I never check the mail. It is only junk. I pay all my bills online.

I will miss newspapers only because they are good for eating crabs and cleaning fish.

I had a landline for about a year in my house until I realized that I only used it to call the pizza guy and then I got rid of it. I have gone 9 years cell only.

I will not give up hard copy books. I have a kindle and a tablet but they don’t always work on the beach or in the treestand while hunting.

I need TV for football and hockey.

Most of my music is classic country, classic rock, classical and reggae. Today’s music sucks, but maybe I am just getting old.

I have worn a watch since high school. I will not give it up.

You want to flip to something you know about where it is, you find it quickly.

I’m not talking about having to bring up the search function, type in some specific thing, then find it. You might not even know just what word is applicable.

Besides, so much with books is assumed you’re reading fiction stories. In non-fiction, there is much more variety and not just narrative text. In non-f, there are many more possibilities for visual cues where things should be.

Plus there is still more eye strain with digital pixels. I can attest to that.

Very good and interesting list. Additionally, just as the Canadians have discontinued the penny, so will we. I wouldn’t be surprised with our currency devaluation that the nickel and dime won’t be far behind. The quarter may become what the penny is today. With e-commerce, this is coming.

Also, the old FM stereo systems we used to buy are all but gone now. I don’t think the cloud replaces all the hard media, but rather we will have computer hubs that control everything in our house, including our digital media and utilities, pay our bills, pretty much run our lives as much as we wish them to.

Books, buy them now while you can.

Landlines? No, too many people are realizing that when (on the Gulf Coast) you get hit by a Hurricane 9 out of 10 times the ONLY thing that will work is your Landline.

Music? Somebody’s showing their age. It's human nature to sort of fixate upon the music of your youth and young adulthood, it's the soundtrack of so many of your best memories. However, that is not to say that there is not new music being made to suit anyone’s taste. It's a veritable Renaissance of music, without the tyranny of the record labels.

You just can't passively sit back and expect the music to come to you anymore, nor can you expect to see it in a store or hear it on commercial radio. You've got to seek it out, and seeking it out is easier than it's ever been.

Don't know how to go about it anymore? Set up your own “radio station,” lol. There are several sites that allow you to do this. The pioneer and still perhaps the best known is Pandora, http://www.pandora.com although there are others.

Just go there, set up a username and password, enter in a song or musician you love and let it go, giving thumbs up to the songs it chooses that you like, thumbs down to those you don't and no rating if you're not sure. It builds an algorithm unique to you, to guide what music to play that you will like. Give it time, at least several weeks.

I guarantee you won't be saying new music sucks.

I have a strong spacial component to my memory, so I have some books too in which I recall exactly which part of a chapter or page contains what I’m looking for, even when I don’t remember a particular word to do an electronic search. In general, though, I don’t think manual searching comes anywhere close to electronic searching.

As for eye strain with ebooks, e-ink devices (as opposed to ordinary CRTs) are easy on the eyes. Also being able to make the size of the print larger is a great advantage compared with ordinary books. The print in many conventional books is too small to be read comfortably by some persons (especially older persons). Cataracts have reduced my vision to no better than 20:30 in my best eye, but I can read ebooks with ease.

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