[perl4ever]

I never bought my first iPhone. I am however, not at the point at which I feel like the world should stop turning. I'm more like "ok, I am capable of selecting the good things from the bad, and letting go of the novel tech I don't like". Perhaps that is a product of being middle aged and I will feel differently when I am 80.

Douglas Adams wrote: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

I like to look at classic car ads, and I saw one for a car from the 60s or whatever, and I forget the exact phrasing, but it said it had had a modern type of stereo installed, which had AM/FM and a CD player. Which I thought was funny, because that kind of pinpoints the assumed age/generation of a buyer. Going by Adams, someone who thinks car CDs are new, but good, could have been up to 35 in 1985 when the first car CD players came out. Which is exactly the age to remember mid to late 60s cars as desirable as a teenager. But now they are close to 70 years old, and that's why the prices of such cars are trending down.

I'm not sure that it's inevitable that you hate new things as you get older. Maybe it's more that people feel insecure about their ability to choose which new things they like, because it becomes a disorienting flood.