Published on 12, July, 2020
I've borrowed this question from something intimated in another thread.
Do you think life has improved for you as you have grown older?
Is it because society has changed or you/your life have changed or a combination?
There was a comparison in another thread with 1980.
I realise some of the readers here won't even have been born then!
I could write a long list of ways in which my life has improved since 1980, both on a personal level and on a 'society' level.
Where 'society' is concerned, the invention of the internet has made me much less isolated, much more knowledgeable, much more in control of my health and not at the mercy of the NHS.
I wouldn't know about my autism and many other things without it.
Also, mobile phones/texting and email mean that I no longer have to make phone calls (including from phone boxes!).
I could go on but I might even bore myself.
There is really very little I miss about 1980, except perhaps a quieter pace of life in general.
It's an interesting question and we all have a past, no matter how far back it goes.
How is it for you.
Better or worse?
As someone a bit younger (I think) than other commenters here, I'm finding this interesting.
I was born in the early eighties, so not born online, but computers, and then the internet, slowly crept into my life in my teens.
Things are mostly better for me now, certainly in my personal life, but partly because of technological change. I wouldn't have met my wife without the internet, or managed a long-distance relationship without Skype or Zoom. And, while I've never really felt I "found my tribe," I have made good friends online and am a lot less isolated than I would be without it. Blogging has been good for me to process and understand my emotions, but private journaling never worked for me; it's the interactions with readers that help me to write. Plus, like Shardovan said, I was probably "born old" and wouldn't have fitted in whenever I was born (most of the music and TV I like are from the 60s and 70s, and the books I read tend to be even older!).
Also, although it came to late for me, it's good that high-functioning autism is picked up now whereas there was really no awareness of it when I was at school (hence I didn't get diagnosed until years later).
The downsides are the total sensory overload from omnipresent "devices" nowadays not to mention video adverts in shop windows and on the streets and even more noise. I find this makes me very uncomfortable, more so as I get older, and I'm not sure how much is my resistance to it declining and how much is that there are just more noises and moving pictures now. Sometimes I would like to live in a quieter era. As an Orthodox Jew, I don't use computers, TV, phones etc. on the Sabbath and it's very calming, but I still end up back on them straight afterwards (the downside of having most of my social life online, and of my wife being stuck in the US until her visa arrives).
Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like being a teenager in the era of social media. Would I have made friends online more easily than I managed at school? Or would the kids who bullied me at school just bully me at home via Facebook? It's scary to think about. The secondary school I attended has had three student suicides in the last five years or so, which terrifies me.
I truly love this post, thank you so much for writing it. You have summed up everything I feel so much better than I could. its nice to find a kindred spirit