this stuff that I find remarkable is just how the world is to her...
This is exactly what I mean, thank you. I look at my 95 YO grandmother and think, wow, what an amazing time in history she's lived through. She grew up on a farm in North Dakota, with an outhouse and kerosene lanterns, one pair of shoes, and literal horse power to work the land. She's still alive (but her awareness is superficial most of the time) in a time when farms are on scales that would have been unimaginable, with machinery to do the work immeasurably more efficiently. There came a point when she just stopped learning any new technology - her needs were more than met and she simply decided to stop participating. I can't imagine the mental adaptations and adjustments that were required of her generation, just to function in society past the 1980's or so.
I often think that we're moving ahead far faster than is... safe? Wise? I wonder what the consequences will be, of forging ahead of our ability to evolve enough to keep up with the changes technology is bringing into our lives. In broad strokes, I'm talking about things like our much more sedentary lifestyle - overall, covering say, 4 or 5 generations, which is faster than the correct adaptations can be made.
A specific example, of the top of my head: the eye. I have done zero research on this, it's just something I'm pondering in a vague sort of lazy Saturday kind of way. How much more visual input does the average person process every day today, versus 50 years ago? Not just the obvious stuff, like computers and devices, but also the constant onslaught of visual advertising that comes at you in any number of ways too, including the irritating crap in the corner of the TV screen. Your eyes are almost under assault any time you interact with the world.
And I'm not even considering the psychological consequences of all that input coming at you almost without pause. Just the physical implications on the structure and function of the eye itself. I wonder about stuff like this. What consequences are we experiencing that we never connect to constant information input? An obvious one is headaches - do we suffer more, fewer, no difference? How much of what we typically blame on our stressful lifestyle is really to be blamed on our inability to physically adapt to the changes being "forced" on us by the constant intervention of technology?
This isn't meant to be a tirade against technology, and I hope it doesn't read that way. I just wonder, in an idle sort of way, what the price is.
And I still think this is really, really cool!
