What is it that defines a person as old? I’ve heard most of the clichés like, “age is just a number” or “you’re only as old as you feel” but can there be one defining moment where a person comes to the realization that yes they are indeed old?
For me at least, getting old starts when you first utter phrases like “when I was your age” or “kids these days” and follow up with a horror story about how tough times were before all of today’s modern conveniences.
There is a series of commercials for AT&T U-verse Internet that features a group of kids no older than 10 or 11 who squawk about how easy kids these days have it, in reference to a group of kids who look to be around seven or eight years old enjoying the company’s ultra-fast Internet service.
While the commercial is blatantly facetious, I can’t help but think that it’s not far from the truth.
Technology is one of the biggest factors when speaking about generation gaps and often times when thinking of someone who you’d consider to be old, you imagine them being clueless when it comes to today’s technology.
Generation X (my parents) is widely referred to as people born between 1960 to 1980, and they saw the advent of the audio cassette and compact disc, as well as the handheld calculator.
Generation Y (my generation) is from 1981 to 2000 and we saw the spawn of Macintosh computers as well as the Windows operating system and something called the World Wide Web.
From that point on it was a free-for-all and essentially everything mentioned above has all been crammed in to one device.
With the exponential rate at which technology advances, we may be seeing siblings experiencing generation gaps rather than parents and their children. Little Johnny may no longer refer to big brother Joey as his older brother, but as his old brother.
As a product of Generation Y (born 1985), I feel like I’m being slighted and denied the opportunity to watch things advance to a point where I can just say that I’m comfortable with where I’m at and bow out like my dad essentially has.
I’m by no means saying that my father is hopeless when it comes to technology; he knows his way around an HD TV and Blu-ray player and can navigate a computer just fine, but he still uses a flip phone from 2005 and doesn’t text message or partake in any forms of social media. Then again he’s old (sorry dad).
When do I get to pull out of the never-ending race to keep up with technology? I feel like 28 years old is too young to just call it quits.
Will people laugh at me if I pull out my iPhone 4S in two years to text message someone? Will they say, “you still have one of those? I haven’t seen those in years, you must be old.”
No, I won’t go down that easily.
What I would refer to myself as, and fellow Gen. Y members feel free to use this one, is “the new old,” my finger is still on the pulse, I’m still very tech-savvy, but I can also sit and grumble about “kids these days.”
They will never know what it was like to wait 15 minutes to download a song on Napster or race to the family computer (not personal laptop) to talk to their friends on ICQ or MSN Messenger because text messaging was unheard of at the time.
I’m in the generation that gets to be old before its time thanks to the speed at which technology keeps accelerating. I get to be young enough to keep up, but old enough to reminisce on archaic or extinct technologies.
I may still be a while from being officially considered old, but for now I’ll embrace “The new old.”
