In my late 40s now, and I find I’m beginning to dread change.
But…
It’s not major change that brings me dread, it’s small stuff. I’ve made major career changes several times in the last ten years and taken some risks that have paid off nicely. Wasn’t too bothered by that, and I enjoyed the accompanying learning.
What bothers me is not being able to buy products I like anymore because they’ve invariably been “improved” to the point I no longer find them useful. Example… I recently got a new case for my phone. Bought the exact same one online and guess what? The headphone jack no longer fits because they changed one tiny component of the case.
I have a jacket I really like. Tried to buy it again only to find it’s been “improved”. Not that they really made it any better, just changed around where the pockets are. But they did it in such a way that I can no longer put my company insignia in the correct spot. Luckily I was able to find a store with the discontinued version that I wanted and ordered two. I’m going to have to do a lot of that going forward, I think.
I especially dread the prospect of buying a new car in the next couple of years. In my job, I drive a lot of rentals and therefore get to sample many kinds of vehicles. I hate them all. Over-complicated, over-engineered pieces of crap largely designed around how well they can synch to your phone. Who thought touch screens were a good idea in cars? You have to LOOK at them instead of just twisting a knob. My current car is a 2001, complete with actual knobs and buttons and I now wish I could keep it forever.
It feels as if the marketplace is somehow targeting me personally like in that joke George Carlin did about inlaid car door handles: “I like that, don’t you like that? That’s why they stopped making them. They found out we liked that.”
This isn’t just a rant. I’m a little worried I’m falling into a trap of aging. Is this a common part of getting older? I still retain the ability to learn, I still like my technology. I fly a very technically advanced airplane for a living and carry an iPad everywhere I go, so it’s not that I inherently dislike technology. But I’m finding it harder and harder to find what I want, and no longer able to rely on getting it again.
It’s not change you fear, honey. It’s capitalism. It’s good to fear capitalism, because it’s eating us all alive. We are all experiencing this increasingly cacophonic swirling miasma of meaningless choices that are no choice at all. Some notice it more than others.
I am agoraphobic and nothing does me in like changes to my normal. I find if I approach it slowly I am able to ingest it better. I know exactly what you mean about cars and all tech-y bullshit on them. It’s just not necessary. Everyone carries a phone/iPad around. Buy what you can and stow it for the future use and hope things slow down. That’s my plan.
The vast majority of people I know in our age bracket and above don’t like change. I’m going to be 50 this year, and, for the most part, I’m fine with change. Adapting to new things requires time and patience, and I’m not one to rush around anyway.
Heck, we just installed a touch screen in our 2006 Saturn Vue a few months ago to replace the original stereo that failed. I think it’s a great addition that makes the car feel a lot more modern.
Get a rocking chair, a glider is fine if you can’t find a proper rocker.
Set the rocker on your front porch.
Get a large super soaker squirt gun, fill it with cat piss (I’ll let you work out the details).
Occupy the chair, implore passersby to stay the hell offa your lawn. Engage the super soaker as necessary to punctuate your request.
Find a deity, praise same for granting you the gift of mortality.
Dude, I’m 40 and I’m with you all the way. Although it’s not all change that I fear(fear is a strong word, annoyed by might be better.) but I hate change for change’s sake. You bring up cars, I like valuable changes, (eg backup cameras and lane warning lights,) but then other changes seem superfluous and done to give an impression of improvement without actually offering improvement (touchscreens over physical switches as an example) As someone earlier said, there’s a capitalistic need to ‘outdate’ consumer goods, so things are added that impact the style while decreasing the utility. I think that we have in many ways made utilitarian improvements very difficult to achieve on many goods, so to keep us buying new items, stylistic changes have to be made and then marketed as ‘better’ while those who keep their completely useful and sometimes more useful older products have to be painted as ‘outdated’ or somehow ‘worse.’ It’s a horrible cycle designed to separate people from their money.
Every time I go through airport security (which is a lot) I have to pull it out of my pockets and put it in the little plastic bowl. And when I get home, if I forget to take it out of my pocket when I take my pant off it ends up falling out on the floor.
Grandpa Simpson: “I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!”
I think the tendency of people as they get older is to figure life out and sit back and take it easy. But then life changes and you don’t have the motivation to figure it out yet again.
In fairness, a lot of changes aren’t for the better, like making washers and dryers complex and expensive to fix.
OTOH I think you are really getting old when you stop being curious and stop learning. So embrace as much of the change as you can.
I’m 46, generally fine with technological advances, but I agree putting everything on a touchscreen in a car is absolutely crap. It’s fine when actively working on a phone or tablet, but a car? No. Haptic feedback is important when driving a car and trying to keep your eyes on the road.
I imagine that this will be offset a bit by adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping assist becoming more standard (I wouldn’t get a touchscreen car without those). So that comforts me a bit in future car purchases.
As to touchscreens and various interfaces; quoting myself from a post last month:
*-In 1975, I could walk into any house in America, turn on the TV and tune to a channel – effortlessly. Now, I need customized knowledge of the homeowner’s setup to even start.
-In 1975, I could confidently adjust the heating on any car on the road. If I wanted to switch to “vent” a brief glance at where to position the lever/knob, then slide till it clicks. Now, in my vehicle, you find the weird icon on the touchscreen the means “heater/ac”, touch it, then find the colorful shape that (apparently) means “outside air”, then press the other orange square with an arrow coming out, that seems to mean “route to front vents”. My wife’s and kid’s cars have entirely different control flows to accomplish the same task.
-In 1975, when HR wanted a list of dependents, they sent a printed form with a box that clearly says “List of Dependents” and you wrote down the names. Yesterday in the same situation (literally), I get an email with a link. Their link took me to a benefits website with lots of primary colors and pretty shapes swooping by at about once per second. As I scanned this moving coloring book, I finally puzzled out the benefits category choices. They were: “My Health”, “My Wealth”, “My Money”, “My <something>Wallet”, and “My Wellbeing”. You tell me – which one of those is the likely choice for listing dependents?*
I agree that we’ve gone past max utility with interfaces and are well into “random changes by the art department” territory. (Seriously - did Windows 8 improve anything?)
To the OP, I think fearing change is a normal part of aging. When we’re young we have the natural advantages of agility and speed. As we age and lose those, we replace them with the advantages of experience and honed skills. Significant changes in our environment negate our remaining advantages, so it’s natural to be alarmed. And lest I be considered an old luddite; when I finish breakfast I will go to my job writing autonomous vehicle control software.
When you’re young you embrace change, because you still haven’t figured out who you are and you need to experiment and explore, which is fun and exciting and daring.
But when you get older and you feel you have figured out who you are, you get set in your ways, and want to feel comfortable. You start to see the fault in things that didn’t used to bother you, and you wonder why certain things haven’t been fixed yet even after all this time of being shoddy and half-arsed.
I want my life to be comfortable and safe. It’s not, and I fear it never will be again.
This is a lot of it - the lack of standardization. But for me, it’s not so much a cause for alarm, as it is annoyance that a lot of things that should be working for me are actually working against me.
The car stuff is a great example. I shouldn’t have to puzzle out how to turn on the heater. And how about putting the cruise control on the same side of the steering wheel as a matter of standardization, with the exact same controls? A feature like that shouldn’t vary from vehicle to vehicle. To me, that’s a safety issue. The fact that I have to use extra attention to figure this stuff out in every car I drive isn’t a source of alarm, it’s a source of frustration and anger at the wasted time.
I like the Windows example too. I’m not against making real improvements, but I’m so fed up with random changes to interfaces just for the hell of it.
Anyway, I hope you have some influence on standardization in autonomous vehicles. I know a bit about the history of that in airplane cockpit design, and even there we’re moving in a not-great direction.
And when you are 74 and THEY won’t let you in real airplanes and your body won’t let you in any maybe, sorta, could be called and airplane, and your mind plays sly little tricks on you and all the good stuff is in museums and there is only touch screens everywhere that take 2 different pairs of glasses to see good enough to use and… then no body believes what you used to do because THEY say it was not possible, well, then you yell at every noise, “Get off my lawn.” Golden years my backside…
“Separating people from their money” gets a bad rap. It’s what provides a continuous living for millions of families and pays for the necessities and luxuries we enjoy in life. Having to adapt or update to changing products is a small price to pay for the relatively comfortable, healthy and privileged lives we get to live in this day and age.
