Grumpa Joe's Place

I need help! My computer has again disassociated itself from my apple mail. I haven’t received a single message since November 17 and today is the twenty-ninth. I have tried untold times to reconnect it but get frustrated with the language of the help screens and the lack of remembering all the pass words and user names for every blooming step along the way. Luckily, I can access my mail thru a program called c-panel. Even that requires remembering a user name and multiple passwords. When will the computer world ever get simple? I was hoping that all the talk about a new internet would help alleviate the problems with all the theft and rampant hacking, but it remains just talk.

After watching the series Home Fires I long for a more simple time in life like it was in the nineteen forties and fifties: pay phones, small towns, lots of individual shops selling specific items like meat, bread, etc. bicycles instead of cars, trains instead of planes, small farms just outside town, country lanes, and not super highways, raising chickens in back yards.

Houses were small, but adequate. People only needed a place to shelter from the elements. Contacting your friend meant walking or cycling to his house and calling his name until he came out. Playing games was mostly done on the street in front of your house or on a table with cards or a board. Times have changed radically in my life-time, and not always for the better. The transition from no news to needing to have news in your hand all the time has begun to make us paranoid about the world. Auto accident death rates were on the decline because of the magnificent safety features included in new cars only to lose ground to people paying more attention to their personal contact equipment instead of paying attention to the road.

Even health care has changed dramatically. We now have emergent care clinics we can run to every time we have the sniffles. Before we had chicken soup, or Vicks Vapo-Rub to take care of us. Although I love all the modern inventions and developments to make our lives better I am not sure we are any better for it. Before we learned to cope with a situation, now we expect someone to solve our problems immediately. If something doesn’t happen fast enough we begin to obsess or become anxious to the point of becoming incapable of existence. The solution for anxiety is usually some drug. Drugs make us dependent and less able to cope and sometimes create new forms of anxiety.

Before email and computers, we wrote memorandums to each other, or met face to face. Then the telephone arrived on our desks and we could talk to people. Phones did cut the number of memos but eventually there were too many calls to answer, and we sometimes had multiple lines coming to the same instrument. Email was a great solution to many business communication problems, and soon our in baskets were piled high with electronic messages, just like when we had paper memos. Today, we’ve migrated to messaging on phones. Texting will allow better faster communication for awhile at least until something else will be invented to take it’s place.

The entire world has the need for speed. Why? Beats the heck out of me, I kind of like the idea of devolving instead of evolving. The idea of moving toward a slower happier life seems much more sensible, and already such a phenomenon exists, it is called old age. Our bodies will tell us when to slow down and how to handle a day’s activities. If there are too many things to handle we will just defer them to another day or forget about them. Nature at its finest, without the need for a new invention to help us slow down.

Perhaps the youngsters will invent a few apps for coping with old age. Most likely they will all involve speeding up our routines and destroying our contentment. The nice thing about old age is that if we do decide to use a new fangled app to cope, and we find it only frustrates us we will merely stop using it, and, or find a senior way to work around it, or do without.

Filed under: Aging, family, health care, Memories, Warm and Fuzzy | Tagged: coping, Old age, Technology | 2 Comments »