AS a twenty-something, I have a real mind to send Steve Jobs a nasty email for ruining my retirement.
I was looking forward to marvelling at some new whiz-bang contraption in my twilight years, while telling some young punk how, in my day, iPads didn’t support Flash. Thanks to Jobs and his high-waisted jeans, however, it will be a lot less starry-eyed wonder and whole lot more humbug.
When I’m 84 and daytime telly’s been cancelled because the last of the Andrew O’Keefe clones has died in a bizarre Ready, Steady Cook accident, I’ll be bored stiff.
Global warming will have rendered my gardening efforts useless and my lovely country view will be spoiled by a 50ft statue of General Bob Katter manning an anti-aircraft gun during the great Banana War of ‘35 (he warned us, but we laughed).
Nothing notable will have happened since the 2060 Delhi Olympics proved that papier-mache aquatic centres are a cheap, but disastrous, alternative to concrete ones and bookstores will only stock Masterchef cookbooks and Justin Bieber’s autobiography.
I’ll spend the rest of my thumb-twiddling days watching Back to the Future II on Rainbow-Ray and wondering how Robert Zemeckis knew shoulder pads would come back in such a big way.
Technology and nifty gadgets were supposed to be my salvation. Sure a lot of oldies couldn’t give a stuff about trendy gadgets - like my Granny, for instance, who thinks computers are a new, more difficult, version of the Rubik’s Cube.
But I wasn’t going to be one of those. I was going to marvel at shiny new thingies and unfathomably fast computers.
Now, it’s looking more and more likely that future Jason won’t even look twice at the latest iThing of 2058.
Technology has progressed ridiculously quickly over the past 10 years.
It’s not like the ol’ days where major advances were decades apart and the only fancy inventions between colour TV and CDs were tacky novelty kitchen gadgets (feel free to abuse me and angrily list inventions in the comments below).
These days, a giant digital leap is taken every time Bono clicks his fingers.
Click. Did you hear that? Click. Facebook. Click. iPhones. Click. 3D. Click. iPads. At this rate, Mr Jobs and Mr Zuckerburg, I won’t be marvelling at anything when I’m 84.
Because of innovators like the pair of you, I’ve been desensitized to progress.
I take technology for granted and expect nothing less than genius.
When it comes to gadgetry, Gen Y are spoiled for choice - and it’s our cross to bear (except in the third world where they worry about silly things like food, water and genocide).
I recently bought an iPhone 4 and within about 10 minutes, I’d formed a list of inadequacies the iPhone 5 should address.
If there isn’t a continual stream of quantum leaps in the latter half of this century, I’m going to be a very cranky old man indeed.
But at least I’ll still get to tell twenty-somethings that they don’t know how good they’ve got it or have anything real to complain about.
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