By Dan Barber
As we age our ears and noses continue to grow…have you ever noticed that? Perhaps it is to allow old people to counter the effects of losing the ability to hear or to smell.
Other stuff also appears to evolve for humans as we grow older. Young folks can mistakenly blame old people of being crabby, out of touch and a bit, or a lot senile. In fact, old people just lose the patience to deal with young people’s bull stool. We used to be young people ourselves and know more about life now than we let on. There is not enough time in the world for old people to explain the really important stuff to young people so they would understand. What’s there to understand you might ask? I would suggest that you check out the “memes” posted by old people on social media sites about the “good old days.”
Young people today are being “digitized” into expecting instant gratification. The human brain is being rewired with the over-abundance of electronic media and video games that replace reality for many children today. Back in the “good old days” people had to rely on their imagination to escape their reality. However, imagination can be very dangerous if it’s made into reality! For example, it created the “happiest place on earth” where people can pay more than $100 to stand in line for 2 hours for the excitement of a 2-minute thrill ride. My imagination caused some dangerous situations in my life… I imagined that I could ride my bike down a very steep hill which resulted in some really serious lacerations and a bruised reality. There were other incidents that are too many to mention here.
Imagination created the video games of today which allow a very dangerous contagion to latch onto a young brain to cause reprogramming to take place. I witnessed medical researchers trying to use that technology in an attempt to reprogram the brains of military personnel, to help relieve the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), i.e., altering or blocking the reality a human being actually experienced. I predict that in the future someone will be able to figure out how to make a bowl of oatmeal think just by sticking a couple of wires into it that are hooked up to a laptop computer.
In a busy world today people can multi-task by listening to a book being read to them while commuting in rush hour traffic. Or they can tackle a big deal on an international conference call on their hands-free smartphone while driving… I would still worry about distracted driving because hands are still connected to the brain, and disconnecting the brain from the task at hand is a dangerous thing. But people mistakenly think that taking away all of the modern electronic devices would only create a very disadvantaged human and place them on the verge of madness.
The trouble of having all of this wisdom in old age is the fact that we are now too old to do anything with the important stuff our elders tried to teach us in our youth! If we were to try and explain the important stuff to young people they would just ignore the advice.
It’s time for me to ask my computer to check my nonsense here for spelling and grammar errors, silence my smartphone and turn off my large flat-screen low energy TV with a couple hundred channels to choose from and take a nap where I can dream about the “good old days” when I would complain about not having anything to do.
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