…to the above QOTD: I wonder whether this irritation towards the modern world’s increasing (and likely over-) complexity is just a generational thing?
I have no idea as to the age of the commenter in this case, but I know that this disenchantment and hankering after a simpler life seems fairly common among people of my age, for the simple reason that it’s a common factor of life among my friends and, lest we forget, Readers of this here website.
But do the various “Gen” types feel the same way? I mean, we Olde Pharttes can remember (a bit) how much earlier times were less complicated and simpler. But in the case of Teh Youngins, are they even aware that life can be simpler, given that all they’ve ever experienced is Smartphones, the Internet, self-drive cars and refrigerators that can tell you when you’re running low on milk?
And considering that most Millennials, let alone the Gen X/Y/Z tribe don’t know how to change a flat tire, cook a meal from scratch and drive a stick shift, would they embrace a simpler world when so much of their daily life is smoothed by technology?
I suspect not, for the same reason that people of my generation would have no idea how to drive a horse-drawn carriage or be able to transmit a telegraph message in Morse code.
So our final few years of life on this planet seem doomed to be techno-centric instead of simple. What joy awaits us.
Please, sir, we Gen Xers were the latchkey generation. Left to our own devices, we learned, perforce, to do most of those things early.
Seconded. I was helping Dad in the garage by spinning lug nuts off and on starting at 5 or so, and I learned to drive in a manual-everything Chevette (transmission, steering, and brakes):
https://amzn.to/480SJIn
(except that the Chevette was a 4-speed, with reverse to the upper left of the H-pattern)
Don’t lump Gen Xers with the useless snowflakes that followed.
I strongly suspect that most of the people wanting a “simpler life” really only want *some* things to be simpler.
I remember pre-internet life, pre-cellphone life, and pre-smartphone life.
I don’t want to go back to that. At all. But I have basically no social media apps on my phone, and only play one game–solitaire. So it really have the same impact on my cortisol levels that it does to people who are always tweeting and instragamming and sending a brazillion texts a day.
But when we replaced my fridge and dishwasher recently we really focused on simplicity and maintainability.
I don’t mind that cars are really complex under the hood, that’s what mechanics are for. And in exchange for that we get cars that go 6 or 10 thousand miles between oil changes, and last 100s of thousands of miles with *average* care.
And they don’t pollute like 60s cars did. I’m not talking about Co2, I remember riding my bike through downtown as a kid and *tasting* the air–this would have been around 1982/83, and I lived in a small town in central Missouri. 12 years later the cars had been so cleaned up that even Chicago are didn’t have that taint. Well, it had a different taint, but that wasn’t from the cars.
I *want* my doctors to be as technical as possible. I *want* (well done) AIs looking at my blood work, my MRIs and CT scans and whatever else, and backstopping and informing my doctors. I want “liquid biopsies” that can catch cancers very early. I want to go get 3 vials of blood drawn and have the fooking machine spit out recommendations based on my blood and genetics.
But I don’t want a “smart” home–although I do have a thermostat that lets me set up a schedule for the temperature, and I do have 9.9kw of solar panels and a battery backup for the house.