"My generation, it seems, had the last of the truly low-tech childhoods, and now we are among the first of the truly high-tech parents."
I found it sad somehow to think that we are the last generation of parents to have grown up without the internet. Like childhood has been lost somehow. I think technology is amazing, don't get me wrong, but there are things I want for my kids that can't come from a screen. It is a brave new world.
I think part of my choice to live overseas and out of the city comes from this desire to give my children a simpler life, for now. My son has an iPad, but he also has a spider collection (live!) that he caught in our neighborhood. Push and pull. The world will come rushing in soon enough.
I remember another article I read about how much change humans can tolerate in a lifetime. The author wondered if there was a limit, if eventually the world became too strange for the elderly and they could no longer adapt. Will change keep coming faster and faster, things becoming obsolete before they are even popular? Every generation has feared the changes of the next, but humanity still exists.
Then there is hail and piglets and puppies, and I trust that we are going to be okay, by the grace of God.
P.S. The same day I posted this I read the essay "The Surrender of a Cockney" by G.K. Chesterton. It's funny how life connects. Here is an excerpt:
"If you will take my advice," said my friend, "you will humbly endeavor not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that every literary man must live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys and the squires? ...Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had had quite enough of the country... You hunger and thirst after the streets; you think London the finest place on the planet."
There is definitely something to be said for the modern, technology-filled life as well. Balance.
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