It is an evil which awaits us all, and which arrives slyly. Without being a question of age, it is more easily caught when you reach your fifties. It starts with a raise of the eyebrows, perhaps, a pout of disgust, or even a sentence like: “I tell you, young people! »
It’s confirmed with the lack of desire to go google the thing you don’t understand and voila, it’s done: you’re overwhelmed. You find that life goes too fast, that everything is noisy, dizzying, difficult to understand. You talk about society by excluding yourself, as if you were no longer part of it.
Let’s do a test, with the title of this news published in The Press : “A transgender youtuber will host Eurovision online”.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how overwhelmed do you feel reading it? How many terms should you google? If you read this story to someone who went into a coma in 1980 and wakes up today, it will feel like they’ve slept for 500 years. We will have a lot of explanations to give to bring it up to date. I wish you to be in the category “I didn’t understand everything, but I will do some research” rather than in the category “I don’t understand anything, too bad, I abdicate”.
I presume that many even gave up when they saw the inclusive writing in “dépassé.e”.
I believe that the secret to eternal youth has nothing to do with botox, running or sacrificing a lamb on a full moon night, but with curiosity.
The desire to continue to understand the world around us, even if we feel a little behind. You have to squint, clench your teeth, cling to something solid, and try to understand. Because times are changing, and they are changing fast. And if we don’t change a little too, we sink.
This is an issue of particular concern to me. Maybe it’s my job as an author that makes me take it so seriously, that I keep my curiosity alive. I don’t want to write stories of nostalgic youth as if my childhood had been the best time of my life. “Ah, the music of the 1980s, were you good enough! » « Ah, REM!, nothing has been done better since then! » I’m not in a hurry for « In my time… » or « It was better before » to come out of my mouth. To be the guy driving below the speed limit in the right lane, out of four flashersand who watches the young people go by at full speed.
It was a fairly recent article that inspired me to write this column. Hang on. It comes from the QcScoop site: “The vaper from Tulum puts her breast implants up for auction”.
Reading it, I felt old. I understood the news because I keep myself up to date on all things popular “culture”, but I feel like few women of my generation would put their breast implants up for auction.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think that’s the norm. I do not quite understand the process, even less the interest of entering into possession of said objects. I would have liked to talk about it with my father and my mother, to see what they would have thought of it!
My parents, born in the 1930s, have seen a lot more confusing things than I have. One of my father’s childhood heroes was Dick Tracy, a comic book detective who had a walkie-talkie watch. It had marked him. My father died in 2013, two years before the arrival of the Apple Watch. I know he wouldn’t have come back.
I remember showing him the app Google Maps in my phone. For him, it was science fiction. He was of the generation that got to its destination by reading the road signs. (They are still there, you hardly notice them.) If the route was complicated, he unfolded a road map. He was even able to fold it up properly, without breaking his nerves, he who was anything but patient. To avoid shaking him too much, I preferred to keep him quiet because my phone also had a compass, a level, a dictaphone, a stopwatch, a…
I wonder if it’s technology that will make me feel outdated. Will this happen to me with the driverless car? When will I have surgery performed entirely by machines? When will my personal assistant robot rebel and start a revolution?
I leave you, my printer refuses to print the NFT that I bought on a blockchain with my bitcoins and I have to go see what’s going on.