As parents, we love sharing the harder aspects of “simpler times”--when we traveled uphill both ways on paths beset by obsolete inconveniences. In my house, we’re still about 2 years away from an eye roll in response to our “back in the good ol’ days” speech, but the finer points regarding things our kids take for granted are already prepared.
Automatic door locks. When my kids get in the car, it’s like they’re playing Chinese Fire Drill at a stoplight for the number of times they run around the vehicle before they actually open the door. But God help us all if I’m too slow with my clicker when they want to get in. Or when the car doors automatically re-lock because their jack-assery has taken too long. At least, kids no longer have to wait for mom to physically...open...every...door. It’s almost unthinkable.
Automatic windows. Imagine the agony if my kids had to inch those bitches down with a hand crank like Mommy did as a child. They barely have the patience and hand strength to wipe their own asses properly.
Safety Features. Who gives a shit about decades of research devoted to making vehicles safer when it means your 4-year-old can’t ride shotgun? “Why, Mommy? Whyyyy can’t I ride in the front seat?” Because. It’s illegal. Because. You’re too short. BECAUSE. The airbag would crush your thorax like eggshells. If you’d prefer to be thrown through the windshield, sliced in half by a lap belt, or concussed against the car ceiling from rolling around, unrestrained, in the way-back of wood-paneled station wagon--go build yourself a Lego Delorean and blast your ass back to 1980. Otherwise, you’ll sit in that backseat booster and like it.
Phones. Once upon a time, they were tethered to the wall or glorified walkie-talkies that didn’t work more than 10 feet from the base. Short of releasing a carrier pigeon or sending up a fucking flare, there was no way to know where the hell anyone was once we left our houses--unless we came across a pay phone. But even then, we had to come up with a quarter or the 25-digit number for the phone card we shared with our whole family. It’s amazing we weren’t all abducted and murdered while waiting to get picked up from remote, phoneless locations.
FaceTime. You know you’re living in “the future” when your kids have more exposure to video chat than phone conversations. Whenever someone simply calls me, they demand to see who I’m talking to, assuming there must be some visual component to anything I do on my phone.
Wireless High Speed Internet. There was no Internet--period--when I was a kid. People were still dialing up to the soothing digital donkey sounds of AOL when I was in college. We had to watch images load one fucking pixel at a time--but my kids can’t handle 10 seconds of buffering. High speed internet has become so efficient that we no longer have cable in our house. My kids watch shows, movies, videos--all via Internet. By the time we finished watching an episode of anything using dial up, my kids would be old men with long white beards sitting in a pile of ash leftover from when all of our hardware burst into flames.
Tablets. They’re the personal pan pizza of screens. Just big enough to be satisfying, but still small enough to take anywhere. Your bed. The car. The doctor’s office. Load it up with anything you might want to consume through a screen or a speaker and use it anywhere there’s WiFi. Which is basically everywhere now. It’s beyond anything I could have imagined. So when my kids complain about which iPad they get to use or what apps won’t work at any given time--it’s impossible to give a fuck. Please. Just rejoice in the majesty of your miracle-screen and shut the hell up.
Virtual assistants. My kids regularly discuss which one’s dumber, which one’s older, and how they’re related. We’ve ultimately established that Alexa is the mom, Siri is the grandma, Cortana is the redheaded stepchild no one talks to, and navigation systems are the great-granny of them all. It’s like a defunct cyber soap opera where every new character gradually plots the demise of the one who came before it. Meanwhile, when I was a kid, the closest thing we had to A.I. was Max Headroom. His jack-ass might be able to sell you a Coke, but he definitely didn't know shit about whether it was going to rain on Tuesday in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Navigation systems. Long gone are the days of squinting at handwritten directions dictated to us via landline phone call or shuffling through 10 pages of turn-by-turn instructions we printed off Mapquest. From now until the digital apocalypse, we know where we’re going and how to get home. Unless of course the Waze app goes down or we’re somewhere that’s invisible to God and any man-made satellite. Like mountains. Tunnels. Or remote coastal communities… Otherwise, we’re all set!
Video games. Ray played “Pong” when he was young, which was little more than two vertical lines passing a period back and forth. And I played the original Super Mario Brothers, whose characters look today like squatty blobs viewed through the eyes of a legally blind person. Characters in modern video games have more detail and definition in their faces and figures than most real-life human beings. No wonder kids get addicted to this shit.
Digital animation. Water in Disney’s Snow White looked like marshmallow fluff compared to the undulating azure blue of Ariel’s ocean in Disney’s Little Mermaid. Fast forward through the age of digital animation to watching Finding Dory as an adult; the water looked so clear and crystalline, I almost cried. My kids were like, “Meh”.
Netflix. Before Netflix, we watched about 5 hours of network TV from sun-up to Soul Train on Saturdays only—and it was riddled with commercials and content we had absolutely no control over. Maybe we didn’t really wanna watch The Snorks, The Smurfs, or The Gummy Bears. Tough titty. We could either get off our asses and physically turn the dial to one of the other 2 channels our wood-paneled TVs could funnel through their rabbit-ear antennas or go watch the news with our parents. Netflix has changed the way adults and children watch anything and everything. To my kids, it’s a button on our Apple TV screen--but make no mistake, Netflix is their favorite button of all.
It makes us sound old as fuck, but extolling our tales of technological deprivation is a parental rite of passage. Fortunately, how much we care about “sounding old” is inversely proportional to how old we truly are. So keep those eye rolls coming, kids. We can do this all day.
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