First Thoughts
For context, I’m a Gen Xer and I’ve always identified as such.
As I get older, I think about all the things in my life that has changed.
This isn’t my analogy, and I don’t remember where I read it, but the way I describe my generation is that we can remember the blinking clocks on our grandparents VCRs and we knew how to set them to the correct time. From there we grew into the technical world we find ourselves in now.
I often compare our experience to my great grandmother’s generation. She was born in a small farmhouse and the means of transportation at the time was horses and light in the dark was candles or some other firelight.
When she passed at the age of 96, there were planes that could whisk her to another continent and over 100 channels on the TV.
I think that if I had told her as a little girl that someday there would be a small box in her kitchen (a microwave oven) that could cook a potato in 5 minutes, she would have told me that I was dreaming. And still, she saw that too.
I think about this from my perspective, and all the transformation we’ve experienced.
Had someone told me when I was a young man that there would be self-driving cars cruising around San Francisco, I would have been skeptical.
And yet, when I see one on the street, I no longer give it a second look. I’m not even curious.
This makes me wonder what else I will see in this lifetime.