Premature Future Shock
May 2006 In and Around Town - Delta

When I was in high school, I used to laugh at my parents because they seemed to have lost all connection to popular culture beyond 1962. I used to ask them if they knew who Bruce Springsteen, Eurythmics and Duran Duran were. No clue. They knew who the Beatles were (you had to live under a rock on another planet to not know them!), and vaguely knew who Mick Jagger was. But they seem to have no interest whatsoever in listening to any music beyond Mitch Miller and Perry Como.

And it annoyed the daylights out of me! My parents really were only in their mid-40s at the time, so I couldn't understand what made them so obstinate about living in the past when there were so many cool things happening NOW ! Years later, I had to drag them kicking and screaming into the 20 th century and onto the Internet so we could communicate by email, and someone convinced them to get rid of their tape-based answering machine.

It was frustrating. Why and how could anyone this young let this happen to themselves? I swore no matter how old I got, I would NEVER, EVER become so out of touch that I would become a laughingstock for my kids.

So here I am in my 40s, and I feel like I'm suffering premature Future Shock. I never read the infamous 1970 Alvin Toffler book (I was too busy watching Duran Duran videos), but I know the term. It refers to technology and society changing at such an accelerated speed, and incessant demands to adapt to novelty, leaving people feeling disconnected, suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation.”

Disconnection. Shattering stress. Disorientation. Yep, that pretty much describes my life since I had children and left the corporate world. I used to pride myself on being an “early adopter” of technology. But there's so much out there, and by the time I adopt to new technology, it's already obsolete!

I got an iPod for Christmas that I barely know how to use. One reason my husband got it for me was so I could download the podcasts of “Desperate Housewives” because I'm usually running around getting our toddler to bed while it's on regular network TV. Have I ever done that? No, because I'm too busy chasing my toddler around to download the podcasts!

And I have a cell phone that is mostly used for making calls and taking occasional photos. I've never text-messaged anyone because my mouth still works faster than my thumbs.

And I still don't have TiVo. If I don't have time to download podcasts, I don't have time to program my TiVo and make sure that I'm getting “Desperate Housewives” and not Russian soap operas.

And now it all makes sense about my parents. My sister, their first child, was born in 1962. From that point on, my parents were too busy and exhausted to care about the hippies, yippies, and Ringo would always be a Western hero, not a Beatle.

And now the crochety old fogey torch has been passed onto me, as I've now hit that age and stage of life in which I actually need to work at keeping up with popular culture, as it's no longer geared directly to me. I have stay up late at night reading the newspaper and surfing the web in an effort to know what's going on in the world. Fortunately, my generation has VH1, pop culture's crib notes. After 45 minutes of watching that channel (which stands for Video Hits One, but like its parent station, MTV, barely shows videos anymore), I feel relatively caught up on the important matters of the day - Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes' and Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie's babies, what stupid thing Lindsay Lohan did this week -- the things that really make a difference in the world.