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You're reading a column by a guy of 83 for one reason and that's to hear him tell you: Life is good. Boomer columnists are full of dread, millennials are discouraged, Xers are depressed, and Gen Z is downhearted, but I am old enough to see the advance of progress.
Yes, there's pain, guilt, a sense of meaninglessness — welcome to the club — but we also have Thai takeout in little white paper containers, and same-day delivery has come to seem ordinary. There are more toothpaste options now than ever. More fragrances of soap.
Cordless phones have changed everything. You used to be on a short leash and the whole family could listen to you murmuring to your girlfriend, now the cellphone gives you freedom of expression.
You can buy an electronic wristband to tell you how many steps you took. Someday it will tell you your happiness quotient.
Depression, anxiety, insomnia: Just take a pill. Back in the day, your mother said, "Go outside. Take a walk around the block and get over it." It didn't work. You walked and walked and you got lost because cellphones hadn't been invented yet so you didn't have GPS in your pocket and didn't know where you were and you had to ask someone and maybe you were in a bad neighborhood and the person you asked had a pistol and now you were lost and down a hundred bucks on top of it.
Surgery is better. Stuff they used to have to slice you in half for, now they run a little tube up a vein, and snip snip snip, as you sit there reading the comics. Back in the day, if you had surgery, you had big scissory zipperish scars, you could never model bikinis after that. Now? No problem.
We have vocabulary today that we didn't have back then. Totally. We never used that word. Ever. We were sort of happy, we were sort of interested. And now we're ALL OVER IT. We used to say "very good" and now we can say AWESOME. Back in my day, awesomeness was limited to the Grand Canyon and you had to go there to be awed and now it isn't odd to hear it applied to clothing items and personal jewelry.
I come from the era of Karens and Joannes and Mariannes, kids had similar names, and now you have Sophias, Olivias, Avas, Isabellas — even in the Midwest, boys named Aiden and Liam, Connor, Dylan, Anglo kids posing as Irish, Noah and Jeremiah and Benjamin, Baptist kids trying to be Jewish. The Garys and Larrys and Bobs are gone. Uniqueness is acceptable. A biological male who is transitioning into a non-gender status and ultimately wants to be accepted simply as a carbon-based life form is perfectly okay.
And thank goodness for me, life expectancy has increased. Old is the new young. People in their 50s can still be immature. I'm 83 and still searching for myself — I was in radio and wrote books and now I'm a singer. Not an awesome one, but not bad.
The corner bar became a wine bar where you say things like, "This Bordeaux has a deep and expressive finish, a dense palate, and a refined but approachable body with aromas of oak and damp earth, but I find the interplay of the complex acidity and the creaminess frankly unbalanced."
I miss the corner bar where guys tell jokes. So the one guy says, "So. This guy walks into a bar with two dog turds in his hand and says, ‘Look what I almost stepped in.'" And the other guy says, "So. An old man goes into a bar and sits next to a young woman and says, ‘Do I come here often?'"
And now I'm going to sound like an old man, which, at 83, I have earned the right to do. I feel that texting is wiping out the art of small talk. You get on an elevator with a stranger on it and you notice something interesting and comment — "What breed of dog is that?" — and he says, "Shropshire shepherd." And this leads to conversation. I have encountered young persons who treat small-talk overtures as a personal assault.
Small talk is a fundamental part of American life, the right of any person to make the acquaintance of anyone else. And I think the cellphone has created a wall between proximitous strangers. And perhaps the minimalization of awesomeness has played a part. What's your thinking on this?
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.