A Dying Breed


I was listening to The Highway on SiriusXM the other day and Miranda Lambert’s Automatic came on.  The song made me feel rather old, but that is not always a bad thing.  While not getting into my perception of the meaning of the song, it does describe a slower pace of life before our current technology made a lot of what we used to do automatic or much faster.

I grew up in the late ’80s and ’90s.  I learned to drive a car with a manual transmission.  I still prefer driving a stick even though none of my vehicles offer that any more.  I changed my own oil and performed most of the basic maintenance tasks on the car.  Back when my parents first got a computer, the internet was all text based.  I had to know commands and how things worked.

Today, most people just use the technology with no understanding how things interact.  Less people know how to be self sufficient.  My generation is a dying breed.  While the younger generation might have less hate and hold on less to the negative perceptions older generations had, they seem to live life in automatic and require the infrastructure to provide for them.  When the generation that knows how to fix everything dies out, who will take over?  Hopefully, there will be enough kids out there who enjoy life in manual to understand how things work when automatic life comes to a halt.


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