Well, it’s time we turned it around. These days, I’m starting to change fear!
I’m 45 and I can relate.
I went into a Brooks Brothers today to buy a new suit. I tried on a jacket in the exact style and size of the Brooks Brothers suit I was wearing (42R). It was a size too small. I told my wife about it when I got home and apparently one of her friends found out that they resized all their clothes. Something about Millennials trending towards being underweight. At least I tried it on first. Her friend just bought a ton of clothes based on the same size he wore for years and suddenly nothing fit!
I’m all for capitalism and all. But I’m kind of sick of perfectly good products being supplanted by more annoying products just so some marketing idiot can keep his or her job.
I haven’t quite figured out if I like streaming music yet (Spotify, Pandora, etc). I’ve always grown up “owning” a music collection. LPs, tapes, CDs, MP3s. Making meticulously crafted mix tapes and playlists and whatnot. I haven’t quite gotten used to the concept of having a music player connected to the Cloud playing random songs selected by algorithms. I’m not quite ready to give up my iPods yet.
I mostly agree.
On the other hand, by paying a modest monthly subscription price for YouTube Red, I can instantly access almost any album I can think of, including those on CDs I bought 27 years ago and either (a) have gotten so warped they won’t play anymore or (b) they’re in a box and I don’t know exactly where that box is. Is it in the second bedroom closet, or did I take it to storage? Hell, even if I had the disc in my hands it’s still easier to get it from the cloud.
Well for now, it is.
I recently turned 40 and I’m increasingly frustrated at the low rate of change. I continue to look forward to new things but year after year it’s the same old crap. It takes me 10 seconds to figure out where the buttons moved to on Android Spotted Dick and another 5 to realize they haven’t actually added anything.
I’m looking forward to new user interfaces like VR and AR, but the tech is moving so slowly. It’s going to be years before it really arrives. In the meantime there hasn’t been an interface revolution since the original iPhone.
My car has almost no buttons; it’s (virtually) touchscreen only and it’s great. All of the arguments about haptic feedback or whatever are bogus. Of course, it has to be well-implemented and not some intern project. I don’t miss buttons even slightly.
All my stuff is in the cloud now. “Other people’s computers”; whatever. It’s safer there than at home. I don’t miss curating various collections of data. I only continue to do it when quality is an issue.
I used to be more resistant to change but I grew out of it.
I decided a while back not to be a person who resists change. I might complain about it (complaining is practically a national sport here).
I’m 50, and I keep my fear of being left behind as an irrelevant, cranky old man closer to heart than my fear of things changing - this seems to work.
In my experience, for changes that are inevitable, it’s better to embrace them fairly early on, because they will happen regardless, and being the last person to accept an unstoppable change is just harder and more painful than being somewhere in the middle.
It isn’t change that bothers me, unless it’s solely for cosmetics and not for functionality. What really irks me is that quality has been on the skids for years with the advent of Chinese manufacturing without the requisite quality control. I live in trepidation of one of our small appliances breaking, as finding another one that isn’t a piece of shit has become an exasperating and often futile exercise. I’ll be 71 next month, which seems an impossibility, and don’t yet yell at clouds or teenagers, but it shouldn’t be too much to ask that somebody make a decent toaster.
I am so with the OP. I do understand that, for instance, once you’ve made the perfect word-processing software and everybody in the world has a copy of it, you need to make some “improvements” at the expense of functions some people (i.e. me) found more valuable, and then sell that version.
But, laundry soap? All my life all the brands have said “New and Improved!” and yet it’s still just soap, but now something’s different about it. For instance the fragrance has gone from something I liked to something I find icky. Or my latest one, which is fragrance-free, started coming out in a gigantic “refill” bottle, and the store I shopped in took out all the smaller bottles so I have to go out of my way to get it (but at least I still can).
People are going to always buy laundry soap and probably the same brand so stop “fixing” it. Ditto for all soap products, it’s fine, leave it alone, I don’t want to have to find a new shampoo when you make the one I was using smell like overripe bananas.
AT least I don’t have to worry about this being an age thing. I’ve always felt this way. Or maybe I’ve just been old for a long, long time.
Too late to edit. For some reason this week I’ve been getting a lot of emails that say something like, “Here’s our updated terms of service [link].” For the information of all these people, I don’t want to read your terms of service even once, let alone every time you change them. You think I’m just going to go along with whatever jizz you’re serving up. I’m not. I am going to delete your app. Goodbye, Twitter.
Fear change? I suggest you start with just some nickels. They aren’t as…
Oh. Sorry.
I can usually adapt to new technology reasonably well, so that isn’t really an issue for me. Like the OP, too, I notice that certain products I like seem to disappear from store shelves, and I do find it mildly annoying but not a huge detail.
You know what really does make me sad? When stupid little changes (that I think are negative) happen to things and places that were once central to my life, but have utterly no immediate impact on it now.
A few days ago I visited UCSD to take photographs. I saw my old dorm, one of six identical ones named after historic exploring ships, and – oh noes! – where each suite used to have a balcony, that’s all been glassed in, so no more balconies. We used to do a good part of our living out on those balconies. On the academic side, I miss the old functional designations that we used to use, for example Central Library, to the new “dedications”, in this case to Theodore Seuss Geisel* on account of a major gift from his widow.
And dammit! They’ve moved things around in the library! Of all the nerve. The recorded music and scores are no longer on the fourth floor, as they should be! Speaking of libraries, the undergrad library, whose distinctive building used to form one side of Revelle Plaza, is completely gone; not the building itself which is now called Galbraith Hall, but the library that used to take up most of the building’s interior space. All gone.
It was oddly gratifying to find that the Revelle Plaza fountain still bears the plaque attesting its donor, Pacific Southwest Airways. PSA was taken over by another carrier sometime in the 1980s, not long after the airlines were deregulated. Most students today probably have never heard of PSA.
*ETA How a university could have a college named for Thurgood Marshall yet still name their library after Dr Seuss is a mystery to me.