Spent today hanging with relatives, and ended up going to a German beer festival with my 93yo grandfather. I honestly find it hard to deal with the idea of how old he is: he's healthy (if a very slow walker), pretty sharp mentally, and full of stories like going to French Algeria before shit got wild or wandering around a stable, unified Yugoslavia. I really enjoy talking to him, but there's such a gulf between our life experiences that it can feel like hard work to find common ground
Idk. I feel bad for my grandparents spending a lot of time sitting around at home drinking tea, doing sudoku, and watching the BBC in the evenings. They have friends in the village so aren't hugely isolated, but living with such a low level of information flow feels like it would drive me insane (of course, Being Online is hardly a good thing for sanity either).
I can't help but wonder if that's a result of one-time c20th cultural change, or if I'll be just as relatively isolated in my old age.
@porsupah that might be the case, but I'm sure you could have found people in the 1960s marvelling at their grandparents' discomfort around electricity and television. Many of those bookers are just as unfamiliar with the internet now. Web 1.0 in the early 2000s already feels like a lifetime ago (imo part of the success of Mastodon is due to it feeling a bit like that era): it seems likely that within my lifetime, the internet will change in ways I'll find alienating and hard to accept
@spinflip I think it'll prove to be a generational thing, going out with the technophobic. (No disrespect; my mother is in that number. Perfectly capable, but *knows* she can't use a browser - it's too alien a concept to bridge)