Things that make us live longer, or at least live easier.

I was visiting a friend and we were talking about ‘the good ol’ days. We got there because I was actually feeling a little under the weather and he advised me to take some cold medicine even if it’s not a full blown cold. I told him that I don’t take medicine and never really believed in it. I explained that in the  ‘good ol’ days” people didn’t take cold meds for sniffles and so neither will I. He answered “Yeah, but they also had half the life expectancy we do.” So I started thinking about all of the amazing advances that have been made just during my lifetime and how it was when I was younger.

My youngest son once asked me if there was electricity when I was a kid, (no that’s not funny), and I am not saying that life was so much harder when I was young, but yes we did have electricity and maybe it just seemed harder because we had to do more to make things happen. I don’t think that my kids, and I’ll speak just for me, really understand how nice things are now.

Portable Video Games

Don’t get me started on the old hand held football game that was just a collection of red

I always wanted one of these. 

lights to represent payers on the field. That was back when I was in high school, so probably before all of you. But it wasn’t long ago that the Game Boy from Nintendo was the coolest invention around. Now those old Nintendo games pale in comparison to what a person has access to on their phone.

Streaming Movies

I got rid of my cable subscription at home because there was so much available online. If I think of a movie I can find it online and start watching it in about 2 minutes. When I was first on my own I thought I was such a big shot when I bought a VHS player. I rented movies like it was my job but sometimes the movie was terrible. Of course you watched it anyway because it took you 20 minutes to drive to Blockbuster and a half an hour to find an interesting movie that was in stock. After all that you better believe I would sit through even the worst selection, like Joe Vs. The Volcano. Ick.  Cleaning out the store room at the gym I came across a box of over 150 tapes of meets that were on TV; Olympics, Nationals, college meets, etc. I had to confront the reality that after saving them all for so long, I would never watch them again. Too much of a pain in the neck.

Pay Phones

I remember when there were only a few people who had mobile phones. The rest of us used pay phones. I saw a pay phone while I was travelling this year, and I thought “Oh, look at that, how cute.” But in reality, they were terrible, usually broken, and germ laden, not to mention always feeling like a pay phone was a typical murder scene in movies (that always freaked me out). Today we all have immediate access to a phone. Hands free, voice dialing, web access, with a built in camera. This is real science fiction stuff, or at least my mom’s generation never thought this would ever be a reality. Cell phones are probably one of the biggest advances in tech…. ever, and don’t even start me on the GPS features.

GPS

In high school, I took a map making class and we actually had a lesson on how to fold them. I remember driving on vacations and having to decipher the map while the wind blew in the windows of the car and my mom would be asking “right or left up here?” Now our phones or cars tell us turn by turn and it’s so much harder to get lost. Don’t get me wrong sometimes they glitch out, but for the most part they are pretty helpful. Mine even tells me when there is a speed trap, road construction, stalled cars, and warns me when I go over the speed limit. OK, that part is not helpful.

Dealing with hotels and airlines directly

There are so many web based services that allow us to book hotels, rent cars, and buy airline tickets. I remember when planning a trip took a few hours to organize travel and lodging for meets. Now I can do all three things in about 15 minutes. Sometimes it is not as easy as dealing directly with the hotel or airline, but it is quicker. I recently had to book 3 separate travel plans for one hotel stay because the online app had my days mixed up. It may be easier at times but I still contend that it’s better to talk to a real person.

Playlists

I had Walkmans, Discmans, and even a boom box when I was younger. I could tote around the player and maybe 2-3 tapes or discs at a time. Today I have about 3000 songs on my tablet, and on my phone I have 2 services that play anything I want to hear, whenever I want to hear it.  I don’t have to carry around spare batteries (my boom box took 8 D cells) anymore and my selection is so much more accessible. Win for the music fans!

I haven’t mentioned anything that we haven’t all seen on about 50 online “Do You Remember When?” lists on Facebook, but it is sometime fun to think about. We take so many of the advances for granted, but our children can’t even take them for granted because they have no frame of reference. Yes, we now take sniffle medicine but we are also inundated with suggestions for our restless legs and dry eyes. I don’t remember the suffering of the dry eyed-shaky leg masses that forced those advances but I will give in and say that advances have definitely made life easier for all of us. I will also argue that there are a lot of “advances” that don’t help us live longer, they just make it seem longer.