The Facts of Aging

“If someone can watch an entire season of a TV series in one day, doesn’t that show an incredible attention span?”
Kevin Spacey

The Facts of Aging

I’m getting old. There was a bit of a panic or anxiety that I’m loaded with a ton of information that won’t be passed along. Maybe I should offer workshops at the Senior Center or something.

One of the things that has interested me for this past decade or so was the steady advancement of humankind from around 1860. This was due to new technologies like the steam engine and more which were labor saving. More free time and more time to make art and go dancing and to attend a concert and huge increases is literacy.

The world was zipping along with new changes and, even through two world wars, a blossoming of optimism. Technology can save the day. When Jerry Lewis started his MD fund raising, well of course it will get solved. So many cures to our problems and babies were being born well. A great time.

When Mr. Bush proposed the No Child Left Behind, he started with one question, “why have our education levels decreased steadily since 1960?”. They thought it might be the teachers and started testing the kids. But, I thought it was because television showed up in every house.

Not to sound too gloomy and doomy but we have more distractions than ever and it is telling.

In my interest of the time period, I was reading theater reviews from the 1920s by Dorothy Parker. Describing one actor, she wrote, “He could charm the ring off of a finger” and I thought that was a clever bit of writing. I’d never heard that phrase and would love to insert it into conversation.

So, I thought I’d share it with my WoW team; a collection of about twenty players. They were not interested. Thinking about it, most of them live in the right now with little thought beyond tomorrow.

What a relief! I no longer worry about my lifetime of knowledge being lost or creating the opportunity to pass it along. I know a lot of stuff but, as it turns out, it is not very interesting.