Being awake at 4 am on a Friday morning is not exactly something I would plan. I guess lately I’ve had a lot on my mind, and been wondering exactly how things will pan out. I am fairly content with most of the going-ons in my life right now. Work has gotten better, just meaning I am no longer on the phones having people cuss me out or threaten me, Dave and I are still fine, I am trudging away in the dark wondering about the future just as most people my age are doing…blindly.
My days seem like blurs, more so now then before through my college years. Most of my friends I only get to see once and a great while, and I am beginning to learn the ins and outs of being an old married couple day by day.
I do sense some things missing, such as my long blog rants about the future, the present, but mostly the past. How things turned out the way they did is still a mystery to me. I know everyone who is my age is going up feeling the same way. Our generation is an interesting one. We grew up where most of us, by the time of Junior High were getting our first computer, by high school we were already ignoring our parents deep in our rooms rooting around on the internet learning things that our parents didn’t learn until later in life. Guzzling information and knowledge just as fast as we could and ignoring that sometimes what you do know can hurt you too.
We are growing up in a generation where concerts is a mass of digital cameras and cell phones, documenting every ounce of the event to the point you can smell the sweat, cigarettes, and beer through each photo, bootlegged sound clip, and YouTube video. We are so busy documenting our lives we don’t enjoy them. Everything, and everyday is nothing but a mass of who is doing what on twitter, who will post photos from this party or that get together on Facebook. Who meet who, and where did these people who I may have spoken to 3 times in my whole life go on vacation.
I am not slamming these social networks, I am addicted as the rest of you, but I am slamming our generation.
My mom recently got out all of her Elvis photos, posters, everything and put them up so they are covering the walls of the living room. Wither it is a midlife crisis, or just a mental release, I admire it. She knows everything about him. I don’t think there is a thing she doesn’t know about that man, or that is hasn’t read in her collection of 50+ books about him, or her hundreds of magazine articles she owns. Even now, she has access to the computer and internet at a perfect time. She can keep reading all she can about him. I guess I admire her for doing that because she did something that makes her happy, she didn’t leave all these things she loves in air tight plastic bags, but bringing them out into the light, so she can walk into a room and feel this warmth and love that our generation feels through a computer screen, or an iPhone.
I think it is all about being tangible. Just as people who take all those photos from concerts just to post on facebook (so others may live through them) and they never get printed and placed in an album, but burned to a cd. Nothing is tangable anymore…it is all digital, and deep down it makes me sad. Sure I use a digital camera, and I am even an avid supporter or digital camera are taken with a cell phone, but I hope I don’t look back when I am older and say
“I wish I could have lived and experienced life without a screen blocking my view”
Our generation is an odd one, we have nothing to compare it too. I am not slamming technology, I am glad we aren’t living in caves, but I think we may be abusing this privilege.
We are just simply forgetting to experience life, rather than just live it.
