One thing hasn't changed. Some in the older generation talking about what a bunch of worthless lazy louts the younger generation is. Happened when I was young and it is still going on. I find the same people who used to grumble about the older generation have grown into the same folks who grumble about the younger generation.
I like younger people, they want more involvement that my peers did. They are not as satisfied aw we were standing outside of life and being observers they tend to want more participation. Besides, they can help me set up my TV.
Happy Birthday, Slo! And many more to come if you avoid TNC. That stuff will kill you, but you already knew that.
I'm a few years behind you at 61. My wife and I made a specific effort to make sure our son knew how to dial a telephone, properly handle a record, and all that. We didn't torture him by teaching him about why you need to rewind a cassette tape with a pencil every so often until it finally gets hopelessly wrapped around the mechanism inside the tape player and turns into a wrinkled up mess.
Like you, I like young people. It's amusing me no end to see them turn into us old people, slowly but surely. They are different in some ways, of course. I think they are more accepting of each other than older people for the most part. That's very good. The music a lot of them listen to is baffling electronic stuff with parts of older music sampled and inserted. That's a fad that will eventually pass, and music will come back to being played by humans. It all goes in cycles.
Another side of this is that more people can work from home now. There were trends that way, but it has really accelerated. Another trend that's a little opposite to that is the number of young people moving into apartments in cities. Seattle in particular is turning into a city full of people who live in small apartments and small row houses. I'm not entirely happy to see the development swallow my neighborhood, but change happens. We love our house, but I'm resigned to the fact that it's eventually going to be torn down and replaced by cereal boxes for people to live in. Our son and his fiancee may eventually live there, they may not. It will all depend on how their work situation flows.
The world has become a much smaller place internationally. China was a mysterious place when I was a kid. It was a closed place, and people didn't go there or come from there much. That's all completely gone now. Whether or not anybody is unhappy with our governments' relations with each other or trade imbalances or any of that stuff, it's a good thing that people can now travel a whole lot more freely back and forth for all kinds of reasons. That's true of a lot of places, but especially China. Vietnam is another one that's a completely different situation from when I was a kid. I hope the same kind of evolution happens in the middle east, Iran, and Afghanistan in the next fifty years. The world will be a better place if it does.
I have noticed a trend among younger people to be less and less reliant on owning a car. They seem to wait longer to buy one, and don't have the interest that I had. It makes sense. A car is a bit of an appliance now, and even the most pedestrian econobox is more competent than a muscle car was back when. You can't be a back yard mechanic and make things work and modify them to maybe work better now than you could. There's no reason to be interested in automobiles so much any more, and they aren't.
Other technology is too obvious to talk about, since it has completely altered how we relate to the world. I wouldn't "know" any of you if the internet and TalkBass didn't exist. And then there's the fact that I'm now over 60 instead of 21. So is my wife. Those are the weirdest and most difficult changes to fathom.
that a lot of the younger participants are not satisfied just going to a gathering and being an audience once a week. They prefer to leave the building and get involved with helping people even when it can be challenging.
