As I drifted off to sleep the recollection struck me :
It was the summer between sophomore and junior year of highschool.
In a moment of boredom (a mistake born of inaction to allow on my part being that I was on a SoCal visit to friends and family), I sent a “friend request” to a kid I’d recently enough met at camp.
Instantly I had been sent an im asking where he knew me from.
It struck me the other night that both of us, having lives very different, were both on facebook at the same time.
American life experiences in the present electronic age aren’t as different as we’re led to believe.
A decade later I barely ever check facebook. Yet so many relatives, friends, coworkers, spend more of their existence in the digital than in the real world.
It makes sense.
Starting at my parent’s generation television was the norm, having been phased in fully before they were born.
That’s how it is with the kids probably 5 years younger than me with the internet, 10 years younger as far as facebook/instagram.
(The other day I heard a girl of maybe 13, tell another of similar age, and a younger brother about 8 to not text while biking. I wonder if the amish or more accurately the mennonites try to text and ride horses?)
It strikes me that there are two kinds of people in our society :
•Those who live in the digital.
•Those who live in the real world.
And no demographic is fully contained in either group.
There are grandpas in the digital, yet I’ve met multiple blonde fitness chicks living in the real world.
(One of the latter I was surprised to see one day actually doing a duck face squat session. I had never seen her doing selfies, et al for quite some time. A thick muscular assed and thighed, big hipped, and large breasted fit blonde in her 20s and you’d have thought she didn’t instagram. But business wise she did, rarely, in a specific session where a friend/sister? did the same, the two cameramanning and posing and/or lifting alternatively. It was an interesting gym observation.)
Honestly I find college aged guys to be worse here than college age girls. A guy is more likely to not be able to go a full interaction without checking his phone than a girl is.
It doesn’t take a lot to break the digital addictions either.
→Make life worth living.←