As the saying goes, “Getting old is a bitch.”
I’m about two months out from left hip replacement surgery and everything is working great down there. However, now my right hip is acting up. Damn!
Joint wear and tear are a function of use and time; the more active you’ve been, and the longer you live, the less cartilage you will have to cushion your flexible appendages. The good news is that you’ve lived a long time. The bad news is that you’ll be in pain and less mobile. I can hardly wait.
Almost all of your body parts share a similar fate. The hair starts to disappear on your head (while it gets bushier in your nose and ears!), the skin gets thinner and drier, teeth get ground down, vision gets crappy, you can’t hear shit, and sex drive and ability disappears. Your spinal disks dry up and you get shorter. Arthritis takes up residence throughout your body, making it tough just to get out of bed in the morning. It sucks to be old.
It seems that the function of the human body, except the brain, peaks at about 20 years of age. That’s why a phenom basketball player like Kobe Bryant could compete against “grown men” in the NBA right out of high school. Physically he could run and jump as well as any of his NBA peers. However, he really became great when he began to maximize the potential of his brain by learning skills from others, innovating new “moves”, developing patience, and identifying when to pounce on opponents’ weaknesses. By the time Kobe was 30, he was essentially a finished product, in a basketball sense. He retired at 37 years old, because he could no longer excel against the new crop of young players.
His brain wasn’t through developing, though. At 37 years young, Kobe could look forward to decades of growth in that part of the body. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way for him.
Save a debilitating illness, like Alzheimer’s, one’s brain should become more robust as life goes on, because more life experiences generally lead to enhanced imagination and wisdom. There’s more data stored in there; all you have to do is retrieve it and put it to use. Smart people are good at that. They’re also good at separating useful information from non-useful, factual from fake, truth from belief, etc.
“Knowledge is power”, said Sir Francis Bacon, so it is not unusual that organizational pyramids are typically topped by older folks, who’ve “been there and seen that”. Innovation can be had from people of all ages, but management skills require a level of maturity, patience, and common sense that is often lacking in the young Turks of the organization.
And, so, one gets to old age, like me, and you view life through an experienced lens, much different from the Generations X, Y, and Z (all born after 1965). So much has changed, some for the good, and some for the bad.
As someone once said, “The only constant is change.” One has to accept that, I guess, but one doesn’t have to like it.
The world seemed a lot more fact-based when I was younger. Scientists were held in high esteem, as were educators, historians and hard-news journalists. If your teacher told you that 2 +2 = 4, you could take it to the bank, and when Walter Cronkite told you on CBS Nightly News that J.F.K. had been assassinated, you believed him.
Younger people (than me) seem willing to believe just about anything these days. There are large groups of people who profess to believe that the U.S. moon landing was faked, that inoculations against communicable disease cause autism, that the Holocaust never happened, and that global warming isn’t happening (because we had a cold snap last week!).
Disinformation of all sorts is so prevalent that one can hardly believe anything they read, hear, or even see. It is certainly a different world than the one I grew up in, where, at least, you could trust your eyes and ears. We all seemed to have an inherent sense of truth in the old days; “Doesn’t pass the smell test!” was our way of separating truth from B.S. And, common sense might have been more prevalent among adults: “If it seems to good to be true, it probably is!”.
Just sayin’.
“In my day”, as old curmudgeons like to say, gossiping was considered bad manners, at best, something housewives trafficked in to pass the time. Tabloid gossip news, better known as “fish wrap” or “yellow journalism” thirty years ago, has now achieved a level of respectability and even admiration, among some folks. Fox News, owned by the Murdoch family, is the latest incarnation of the Murdoch’s earlier tabloid sensationalism in such offerings as The Sun, wherein Murdoch instructed his editor to juice up the paper and put “a lot of tits in it”.
Bored grocery shoppers used to purchase The Sun, the National Enquirer, The Star, The Globe, etc. as they exited the grocery store. This kind of “journalism” was a laughingstock among civilized, educated people of America. Jay Leno used to joke that The Enquirer “checked the facts, checked again, and re-checked the facts” before going to print. In other words, the stories were 110 percent gossip, meant to titillate the customers enticed by the salacious headlines: “Elvis Impregnated Queen Elizabeth”, “Martians Control The C.I.A.”, and “Moon Landing Faked!”.
Fast forward thirty years and, OMG!…Murdoch’s Fox News is the highest-rated news outlet in America! How did this happen? It consists of highly-opinionated talking heads supposedly reporting factually on the events of the day or week. It appears that anyone can be touted as an “expert” on Fox, particularly if they have inflammatory views.
Question: How did conspiracy theory/opinion/gossip-mongering/political posturing become legitimate “news”?
Nowadays, there are numerous cable TV programs that employ ambush journalists, peeping Toms, drones, and phone-hacking to invade the private lives of celebrities…all in order to satisfy the insatiable appetite of some Americans for scandalous news.
In the current “social media” age, any type of rumor, invented scandal, or sensationalist theory is quickly passed among millions of citizens via cell phones and populist broadcast media. Devious politicians are using “instantaneous” messaging of this sort to achieve their ends, like sowing discord, smearing opponents, and influencing voters. Candidates spend more time defending themselves from untrue rumors than disseminating their policy proposals.
It’s no wonder democracy is floundering.
The World Wide Web (i.e. the Internet) held such promise when it first arrived. It became possible for any individual, not only those who could afford to go to college, to educate himself (or herself) about anything that has ever been learned by mankind. That’s a staggering achievement.
One has to wonder how long universities will exist, in a physical sense. Why pay a stupendous sum of money to learn something at a university when you could achieve the same thing in the comfort of your home, relaxing in front of a computer, while snacking on a bag of Cheetos?
However, as with the case of many new technologies, devilish forces set about almost immediately to corrupt the initial purpose of the invention. First, it was free pornography at one’s disposal. Then, grifters invaded the medium, finding innumerable ways to fleece the flock. That was quickly followed by a veritable deluge of intrusive advertising gimmicks, perverts devising ways to satisfy their desires, and such. And, ultimately, bored teenagers and foreign spies began to exploit weaknesses of the Web to shut it down…just for fun!
Lately, the promise of the Web has been further degraded as more and more content is being developed that replaces fact with fiction, truth with propaganda, and the hope of unity and cooperation with divisiveness and hatred. So much “fake news” has infested the Internet that it’s becoming hard to separate actual events from imagined. Doctored photos, invented atrocities, and conspiracy theories planted on social media to stir hatred are now commonplace on a World Wide Web that was invented to disseminate facts, to educate, and to share the discoveries and new technologies that can move the needle of civilization.
So much for “progress”!
Probably because I’m old and tired, and perfectly satisfied with my station in life, I am not a big fan of the “social media” craze. I’m sure it’s the wave of the future, but not for me.
Are people really that lonely and, in their minds, so insignificant, that they need to puff themselves up online, to pretend that their life is much more exciting than it appears? Who cares what Suzie Q is doing at this moment, or what Joe Blivets thinks about Suzie Q’s new buzz haircut? I have a daughter-in-law (whom I love!) who has a habit of letting people know when she’s at Starbucks or buying groceries. Does anyone really care? Why?
U-Tube is kinda cool, though. People get to become their own TV producers and, occasionally, they produce useful stuff like visual comedy, a musical performance, or perhaps step-by-step instructions to accomplish some task. The other day I watched a U-Tube video which taught me how to express the anal glands of my dog Baby. Very helpful.
Of course, exhibitionists use the medium to perform outrageous stunts or act like fools, trying to garner attention. As my Dad used to say, “It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt!” However, there seems to be no shame anymore, as our young desperately strive to attract attention and have people “like” them…by debasing themselves!
Go figure.
Generations X, Y, and Z have grown up in this strange world and seem to have accepted the new reality of rampant disinformation, cynicism, and reduced expectations. With good reason, they distrust institutions, government, and each other. Political blame-throwing has replaced baseball as the Nation’s Pastime. A lack of seriousness seems to abound among our young people. One wonders what society will look like and how people will act in another twenty years.
I’m not optimistic, and, hopefully, if everything goes right, I will not be here to experience the Orwellian future.