Every generation goes through multiple iterations of consumer tech, in which how they watch, read, and listen changes as the decades pass. But there comes a point when a jaded adult draws a line in the fiberoptic sand. “This is where I get off,” they say, as if stubbornly clinging to nostalgic gadgetry is a moral triumph.
I'm no exception. My life’s riddled with tech my nephew would roll his eyes at. I'm that idiot you see at the gym getting frustrated while unravelling thin wired headphones for 10 minutes while everyone cruises around in AirPods. I far prefer the feel of paperbacks over Kindle, even as my girlfriend jokingly shuts off the lights at night so she can keep reading on her Kindle while I can't. And my laptop and phone are probably a little thicker than they should be, and they don't have that cool new app.
Some of the lines drawn are arbitrary, and with others, we tend to have annoying lectures prepared for anyone who questions us. I don't have a good reason for avoiding AirPods, I'm just fine with my tangled mess. But ask me about not using AI generators, and suddenly I mount my high horse, gesticulating as I go on about plagiarism, suspending critical thinking and the workforce never catching up to the job loss. Mostly I just find AI generators pathetic. It's like a guy saying, “Sure I could work on myself and go out and get a woman, but porn's so convenient!”
Yet I know there's some who find the tech I've adopted ridiculous. Maybe they're not on social media, maybe they never stream movies, maybe they're not reading this at all because they use a typewriter and think computers are the death of creativity. And with each, they probably have a point. I wish the Old Testament God would return and scatter social media the way he did the Tower of Babel. Something died in me when I got rid of the DVD cases for my movie collection, transferred them to a binder, and forgot where it was years ago because I only stream. Are typewriters the pure form to write with? Perhaps, but as editors remind me, I need editing.
Consumer tech moves at a frantic pace, and as soon as you buy the latest gadget and walk out the door, they're placing the newest one on the shelf. Over time there's often an internal battle between yearning for the nostalgic tech we grew up with, and resisting the ultra-modern crap that keeps trying to infiltrate our lives. So we settle somewhere in the middle.
This involves painfully admitting the flaws in our childhood toys. Maybe that old Nintendo isn't as fun as some of the newer stuff, maybe that Walkman was a bit clunky, maybe using Google Maps is more convenient than that rumpled map of Cincinnati, even though GPS ruined your sense of direction.
It's too easy to say that this is all merely an age thing, because it can relate as much to your personality. I know plenty of older people who have to teach me how to use the new shit, and more than a few younger ones who don't care about it at all. I've just never related to those who get overly excited about minor updates to rudimentary devices. But tech’s often their religion, and it's acceded to under the misplaced idea that some new advancement will somehow fix a flawed human nature that's barely shifted in the past 500 years.
Whether it's tech or culture, I'm just bad at keeping up. I use wired earbuds considering what's often playing through them: old episodes of The Howard Stern Show and Opie and Anthony (when the former was funny, and the latter existed). Are you telling me that a guy who culturally lives in the past uses ancient headphones?
Except for the obvious cases of medicine and travel, I'm not seeing much evidence that staying on top of anything is conducive towards more happiness. We're more than a decade into endless streaming and scrolling, and a growing number of young people are wishing for a simpler time when they could head to Blockbuster, not instantly hear the world's useless thoughts, and not be reachable until checking their messages on the answering machine at home. Some didn't even grow up with any of that, and it looks like heaven.
It wasn't necessarily. It's simply that too much of anything too easily acquired never works. Keeping up with references or technology or even the so-called norms, will always lose out to having family, friends, community, and some work you mostly like. They remain undefeated in terms of the proper way to live. The rest is just a distraction.