Reece's Pieces
The world today is vastly different from what it was just a very short time ago. Phones have become cordless, cooking has become fireless, and cars are becoming driverless. Food is fatless, sweets are sugarless, and our labor is becoming more and more effortless. All this wonderful technology has changed how we interact with each other and how we approach mundane everyday tasks.
From fat-free burgers fried by robots programmed with AI technology to virtual reality, things just ain’t what they used to be. Yes, it is the end of the world as we once knew it. The “good old days” are gone forever.
Of course, if you’ve never lived in the good old days, you can’t miss them. People 40 years old have never known a time without the internet. Our jobs and most of our lives now depend on computer technology. Boomers didn’t use to need GPS. They once knew where they were going. I’m not sure what happened.
Cell phones have been around even longer than the internet. Next month will mark the 45th anniversary since the first call was made from a handheld cellular mobile phone that weighed nearly four and a half pounds. But all you could do was talk on it. By comparison, today’s iPhone weighs barely over six ounces, and you can basically run your life with it. From shopping and paying bills to chatting face-to-face with anyone across the globe. It was only recently that if you wanted to “facetime” your girlfriend you went over to her place.
If the good old days were so good, why aren’t they still there? Those days are often romanticized in our collective memory, and it is easy to be nostalgic for a bygone era. However, as much as we may fondly remember the good old days, the good old days I recall weren’t all that good. A lot of them pretty much sucked. The good old days can look mighty different depending on just who is telling the story.
The good old days of the 1950s in the United States were a time of economic prosperity, but many people of color and marginalized communities were still subject to systematic oppression and discrimination. The good old days of the 1960s meant civil rights progress and social change, but also decades of war, conflict, and violence. Similarly, the 1970s and 1980s may have been a time of relative peace, but they were also when the feminist movement really gained traction and society experienced significant upheaval. These memories only remind us how far we still must go.
It’s odd to think that the times we now live in will once be referred to as the “good old days” as well. Maybe much sooner than we think. Technology is growing at an exponential rate, and the speed of growth is only increasing. In many sectors, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer hardware, new technology advancements and implementation are occurring at an unprecedented speed. This is due in large part to technological feedback loops, where innovations in one area help drive further advances in another, and the cycle continues to accelerate faster and faster.
When I was a young boy two of my brothers and I spent a summer with my grandparents who lived as if they were still in the 19th century. Their light was by kerosene. Their heat was by wood. Their water was retrieved in a pail carried by hand from a well nearly a quarter of a mile away. Their old wooden Georgia farmhouse looked as if had never seen a coat of paint. It was what you would call a two-bedroom, no bath. The customary outhouse was way in the back, but it could still be smelled if conditions were right.
Of course, there was no TV, and reading materials were few around my grandparent’s house so our favorite place was to hang out on the front porch where we would watch the chickens run around the grassless yard. We would listen bored for hours to my grandmother’s stories about our relatives a long time gone. We were still too young to be allowed to go off on our own on any exploring expeditions and were the perfect captive audience for her tales about days when she was young and beautiful. And then suddenly she would remember she was old and not so beautiful anymore and that it was time to load the woodburning stove and heat up the beans and fried potatoes.
Surely there must be some things that will never go away. How will they ever substitute my grandma’s cornbread recipe cooked in a black iron skillet? And what can they possibly make more delicious than a glass full of sweet milk with a slice of that cornbread crumbled up inside? What fake ingredients and chemicals do they have that can match the flavor of a bowl of fatback-enhanced pinto beans? There aren’t any. Yet.
Steve Reece is a writer for the Reporter and a known crime fighter. Email him at stevereece@gmail.com.
