catching up
This is f’ing ridiculous. Absurd. And to lend a phrase from my old friend Chazz Michael Michaels, it’s mind-bottling.
You see, when I was a 6-year-old, I vaguely recall my attempts to:
- Pull the pants off an A&W bear mascot by tugging on the brown and orange bugger’s tail.
- Barter trade my crap GI Joe toy for a far more expensive one with a classmate. I succeeded, but my entrepreneurship was a short-lived joy. My parents were summoned after 2 days.
- Set off a bank alarm. Since it is inherent that I will constantly flourish in the utterly pointless and damaging, I also succeeded, of course. Thankfully, it turned out that you can avoid arrest just by wailing and screaming “I DON’T WANT TO GO TO JAIL” for a good half an hour.
But apparently, if you’re 6 these days, you had better know how to multiply, recognise that Mars is a planet and not a gooey snack, understand the basic principles of physics and (very possibly) construct a small rocket capable of sending a sending a chimp into space.
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling dumber than I already am.
AND, these advanced little buggers are growing up!
What we learned when we were 23, these tots are mastering when they are 14. By the time they start work, they’d have seen, read and learned from case studies, ads, design, architecture and whatever else they could click and find here, there and bloody everywhere, online or not.
It doesn’t mean that they’re smarter. But surely knowing more earlier puts you in some kind of advantage. If they tell you to “absorb everything” and it’ll come in handy someday, then my memory bank is probably as good as a 11-year-old with speedy fibre connection and an ipad.
Every generation feels like the next one is the end of it all. But I think they’re lucky.
It makes me restless. It makes me feel like I haven’t learned enough, seen enough, done enough. That college kids are doing midterm projects today of the kind of thing we thought was bleeping revolutionary just last year. That the bag of tricks we constantly use at work is coming close to being as irrelevant as Arsenal’s annual title challenge. That unless we take in as much as we can, as quickly as we can, as often as we can, we’ll be the dinosaurs in the corner cubicle with the arthritis problem.
Good gosh, I sound like a grumpy old fart.
