Good morning.
I haven't
quit writing these occasional messages, but even when I was composing a single
long year-end letter, making entries from time to time during the year, I found
that I wrote very little during the late spring and summer. Part of the reason is because I spend time
outside puttering with the gardens; part of it, inexplicably, just seems to be
seasonal.
This year
there's an additional reason I've stepped away from them: I've begun pulling together Krystin's writing
legacy. It's a tedious task in some
ways; in order to capture her—especially her sense of humor—I have to copy
Facebook posts and paste them into an MS Word document. I have to do the same with her lengthy blog
entries—truly, like daughter, like father.
There are also her diaries, which Kathy is reading through first (but in
which there is really nothing I shouldn't see or didn't already know about). The diaries have to be transcribed because
they're all hand-written. And then there
are 10 years' of emails that she and I exchanged. I'm in the midst of all of that effort, which
doesn't leave me much (intellectual) energy or time to write much of my own.
I'm coming
to know Krystin better than I did when she was alive. I read most of her blog entries and her
Facebook posts when she wrote them, but not closely. The diaries, of course, I had never
seen. As I read more carefully what she
wrote, I am discovering depths that I did not know were there. She paid more attention to politics than I
had guessed and I realize more fully that she was quite funny at times—the more
impressive because she exhibited that humor in spite of often daunting pain and
depression because of her medical circumstances. As with many Millennials, she paid attention
to the music and culture of her generation—and as far as I can tell, she had a
decent eye for quality and dismissing the dreck.
Whether or
not I can keep at this for a prolonged period remains to be seen. On the one hand, reading all of these entries
and seeing the pictures (Krystin liked to include pictures in her blogs and her
Facebook entries) puts me back in touch with her. On the other, they remind me how much I miss
her and wish I could have her back. So I
plod along, stopping from time to time.
What I will do once I have finished the tedious work is something I
haven't yet figured out. I'm hoping for
inspiration.
* * *
One minor
piece of international news that I found amusing. From the Telegraph
(UK): "Some U.K. schools are
removing them from exam halls after discovering teenagers have a hard time
reading traditional clock faces."
It seems that kids are so used to seeing time represented digitally
(thus numerically) that they can't figure out the time from clocks that have
minute and hour hands. So the traditional
clocks are being replaced with digital ones.
I suppose
that in the grand scheme of things, how you get your time isn't that important.
* * *
Several
friends responded to my request for speculation about changes 1880-2010
compared to possible changes 2010-2140. Italics are excerpts from their responses.
I
am not either a researcher nor scientific person. With that in mind my
expectation is that our days will be very different in the next century. By how
much? A bunch! And that’s my final
answer. I am quite sure this friend
is correct.
Another friend wrote a longer and thoughtful
response. She reminded me that others
have raised the question about scale and magnitude; she noted that one author,
writing about happiness, did so. When I rate my happiness on a scale of 1 to
10, how do we know if your 1 to 10 is the same?
Maybe my 10 is 1/10 of yours or 100X yours. How would we every know? She went on to make a few observations.
A
flippant response: I'm sure my daily
life in 2140 will be WAAAAAYYYYY different than my life in 2010 since in 2140,
I'll be dead. Heh heh.
My
grandmother was born in 1890 and died in 1981.
Shortly before she died, I was talking to her about the changes that
occurred in her lifetime and her main response was "how lucky am I?" She mentioned electricity, cars, airplanes,
but also antibiotics, medical care improvements, household items like washing
machines and dryers, telephones. She
felt like she was the luckiest person to have lived through so many changes.
Apocalyptic
view: climate change has made its
mark. Many of our familiar plants and
animals are gone. Droughts, floods,
hurricanes, tornadoes have all gotten worse.
We finally have to live with what we have done to this planet.
"It's
a wonderful world" view: climate
change has made its mark. Many of our
familiar plants and animals are gone.
Droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes have all gotten worse. But we
have finally stopped the slide, are working hard to conserve what is still
left, and have learned humility.
Another friend observed that those who think about this
aren't of one mind (no surprise).
I
find it interesting how different the views of some commentators currently
are. On the one hand, there are those
who are arguing that increases in productivity have stalled because technology
is now delivering incremental improvements (e.g. electric cars, induction hobs,
etc.), and those who say that we are in the midst of a technological revolution
as profound as the initial industrial revolution. Both cannot be right.
One write
reframed my question slightly—and then chickened out of speculating!
Perhaps
it is easier to frame the question based on the life experiences of a current
100 yr old living in the US. Such a
person would have been born in 1918. For many born in that year, life would
have been very similar to what you have described (e.g., no indoor plumbing, no
electricity, no cars, very little food (especially starting in 1929), many
incurable diseases, significant number of childhood deaths, manual labor for
many, long work hours, terrible pay and work conditions, no social security or
medicare, poor general medical care, etc.).
Over their lifetime the 1918ers have seen major advances in all the
above as well as plane flight, space travel, computers, internet and
significantly longer life spans. One
person born in 1920 who died last year at the outstanding age of 97 told me two
years ago that he felt there had never been a hundred year period of more
accelerated change in all of human history.
Although I am not a historian, my limited knowledge suggests he is correct.
With
that as background, perhaps one can ask the question in terms of someone born
in 2018 and what changes will occur in the next hundred years during their
lifetime. Will the trajectory of change
be even steeper than the previous 100 years?
Alas I do not have a crystal ball and moreover prognostication has never
been my strong suit as I have never been good at any predictions.
One friend made a point I never
would have thought of.
I'd
like to add another facet to the question.
Because of all the changes, the ways we organize ourselves socially and,
relatedly, the ways we think about who we are also change (in my view). For example, smart phones are fabulous. When I and many other parents got one, we
stopped asking each other for information about opportunities for our kids and
started consulting our smartphones. The
"culture" of pick-ups changed drastically. Will our future changes
bring us "closer" together or further apart? With whom?
How will that be determined? When
my teenager refers to a friend, I have to ask where that friend lives -- local,
national, or somewhere else in the world.
Because of technology, he has what he calls "friends" around
the world. What are the implications of those types of changes?
I wrote back that I suspected—hoped!—that the measurement of
significance of change in one aspect of life would be -0-. If in 100 years there is less or little
face-to-face human interaction (dining together, cocktails together, walking
and talking together, and so on), then it will be a world I won't care to live
in. Will virtual reality constitute our
interactions?
And then a
friend got to the heart of the question!
First, he surmised that our
everyday lives will be more different than our current lives as compared to
your great-grandparents' lives. My rationale is that technology changes
more as time goes on. Life in
2140 will be at a scale of 85 compared to 20 in 1885 and 50 in 2018. So, slightly greater changes coming (35) than
in the previous 130 years (30).
One change,
should it come about, would dramatically our lives: teleportation ("beam me up,
Scotty"). Elliott and I have talked
about whether that will ever be possible; we doubt it. Achieving it would mean we had developed
technology that could disassemble us and then re-assemble us, putting every
single atom back in the same place. If a
few are misplaced, such as in the brain or the spinal column, you could lose
part of your memory, your personality could change, you could be paraplegic,
and so on. A biologist friend told me
that "you might be correct that the central nervous system is too
difficult to deconstruct and reconstruct. However I do not believe it is beyond the
realm of possibility particularly since computers might be able to do something
similar after another 100 or so years of improvements." If it were to be developed, suddenly planes,
trains, and automobiles would be obsolete.
(Presumably if you were moving from one residence to another, you could
teleport your sofas and pots and pans as well as yourself.)
* * *
People
often ask me what I'm doing in retirement.
One thing, I tell them, is that I'm having many more social lunches than
I ever did before. Last week I had two;
this week I have four; I have three each of the next two weeks. I enjoy that part of life thoroughly.
With warm
regards—
Gary
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