A picture of me with my grandparents, siblings, and some cousins before going sledding
I’m on a Boeing 757. Out of my window I can see the wingtips, which are bent at the ends to improve fuel efficiency. The web address of the airline is printed on the tips, which should seem totally normal, but still reminds me of back before companies took the internet seriously. I notice this every time. Every poster that has a web address, every commercial, and every billboard.
It’s a habit. When I was younger, if businesses even had web sites, they only had it as a precaution– just in case that internet thing started to take off. I took pride when I first began seeing TV commercials with web addresses in them. I was part of the internet generation, and each URL I saw felt like a small personal victory, as if it justified the hours upon hours I spent on the internet.
Occasionally it occurs to me that people not much younger than I am would never even consider this, just as I would never consider it interesting that a company publishes their phone number. That thought, maybe as a result of my glass-is-half-full mentality, always leads me to the next thought: I am really lucky to be born when I was.
Maybe everyone else also feels as though their generation is especially blessed, but I can’t help but think that mine really got the best deal around. In the less than 30 years I’ve been around, I’ve seen the invention of the cell phone, the computer, and the internet. Better than just witnessing it, these things came out when I was a curious teenager with a lot of free time to tinker.
The best part, though, is that none of these things were around when I was really young. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV, so I spent most of my childhood outdoors. Society wasn’t quite so skittish about, well, everything, so my friends, siblings, and I had free run of the neighborhood, which bordered a state park. I could call my friends (on landlines, of course), and go meet them at our fort in the woods, without even needing parental approval. We built things, raced around, and used our imaginations. In the winter we went into the woods to find the biggest hill and make jumps on it. In the summer we made fishing poles out of sticks and dug for worms to impale on the hooks we found near the water’s edge.
I’m not sure that kind of childhood really exists anymore. I know all too well how easy it is to get sucked into the internet and live vicariously rather than actively. Parents are so scared of everything that when I set my kids loose in the neighborhood, they might not have anyone to play with.
Maybe older generations would say the same thing about when they were kids. They certainly do tend to think of “back then” as some sort of golden age. Maybe kids now think feel like they’ve got it great. One thing is certain though: we live in a great time and it will never be like this again. Let’s enjoy it.
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