A Letter To Gen Z From A Gen X Survivor...

Dear Kids,

I want to give you a glimpse of what came after the Stone Age and before the technological revolution. I’m middle-aged now and grew up in the middle of these two eras. I only bring this up because I feel my relationship with my devices is really developing during this time in lockdown. I feel close to them. I need them. I think I can’t live without them. But once upon a time I did.

Without my smart TV, Apple watch, my Mac, iPad, and iPhone, what would I do all day? Which begs the question, what did I actually do when I didn’t have these devices? I watched network television, kids. You wouldn’t believe how much we slummed it back in the day.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like my smartwatch is my only real friend in this lockdown. It really believes in me. It tells me I can do it, I really can walk more than 3000 steps in one day. It reminds me to breathe, stand up, and tells me that if I take a thousand-minute walk, I could make up for all the steps I didn’t take in the last two weeks.

But there was a time when I wore a watch that only told time. That’s it, that’s all it did.

Once upon a time, we had no cellular phones. Can you Generation Z kids even imagine? Do you even understand the words that I’m writing down right now? There were long periods of time where no one could contact me, and no one knew where I was, and I liked it.

We used telephones whose only function was verbal communication. We talked, yes, I said it, talked, on a landline telephone. It was connected to the wall with a cord. It was a big deal when cordless phones came out. It takes your breath away, doesn’t it? For fun as kids, we did this thing called Prank Calling, where we would randomly call random numbers and say random things to random people for random reasons. We were so random. Of course, there was no such thing as Caller ID back then.

I’m not sure why kids don’t do that anymore, considering they have phones in their back pockets. But then again, I’m not sure why we did that. Now that I think about it, it sounds kind of ridiculous.

When we went to restaurants to meet our friends, we couldn’t text them to tell them that we got a booth. Life was so hard. In fact, we had to use words spoken from our mouths to communicate with one another on a regular basis. I know, how bizarre.

We went to the mall because that was the only place you could buy stuff. We had to go to an actual store when we wanted stuff. Even books. We went to bookstores and even libraries, if you can believe it. Don’t get me started on the Dewey Decimal System. Oh, and we read books made out of paper. You’ve heard of paper, right? We wrote with our hands in this thing called cursive.

We read books and newspapers to find stuff out without the Internet. If we couldn’t find something out, we just shrugged and said, “I guess we’ll never know…” and then promptly moved on with our lives. Weird, right?

We had to go to a bar to meet someone to date. We had to talk to them in real life and even smell them. It was reckless.

Picture it: 1985, some cars did not run automatically; they were said to have a manual transmission. You had to physically move the gears back and forth the entire time you were driving. I've actually never done it, but urban legend has it that it is a totally euphoric experience.

Back in the day, we only had like twenty friends, total. We weren’t friends with five thousand people that we weren’t really friends with. The only things we actually ‘liked’ were those twenty friends. But we didn’t have to tell them constantly that we ‘liked’ what they had to say. And we actually came up with our own original word combinations called sentences, to say, instead of 'sharing', catchy phrases that other people came up with that we found witty.

And again, we used our vocal cords to communicate with each other in person. We would hang out at diners and restaurants, bars, and have face-to-face conversations on a regular basis.

We went to video stores and spent two hours picking out a VHS movie we ended up hating, and had to pay for it and actually come back in two days to return it. Never forgetting to rewind it. Rewind and VHS are terms I cannot take the time to explain to you right now, but you must understand that it was our version of primitive technology.

We did all this movement, going to stores and buying things, renting movies, returning them late, paying overdue fines. We walked around town and didn’t even have a clue how many steps we took.

Can you imagine the anarchy?

In those very video stores, there was a section in the back for illicit material, that’s the only place we could get that kind of ‘material.’ We had to take it to the cashier and watch as she put it in a bag and looked us in the eyes. Not that I would even know about any of that.

If we wanted to take a picture, we had to bring a camera and then wait a week and a half for the film to be developed at a drug store, and then we picked up paper pictures, one copy of each photo. If we wanted to take a picture of ourselves, someone else had to do it for us, and then do the whole process of getting it developed.

Life was tedious.

If we wanted to share those pictures with other people, we had to, I don’t know, mail the photos to them. We didn’t do this often, this ‘sharing’ of pictures. Everyone had their own photo album, a physical book, in their own home. You only shared by showing your photo album to someone who came over.

We didn’t show off about our lives that much. How would we, anyways? Why would we, anyways?

There was a time when laundry detergent only came in the form of a liquid as opposed to pods, and yet, surprisingly, no one was tempted to drink it.

There was a time, believe it or not, when we wanted to watch the news; it was only on a couple of times a day. We had to be in front of the TV during that time or we would miss it. In fact, we had to be in front of the TV at the exact time they played a show, or we missed it. It was a big operation to program a VCR to record a show. The VCR was a big deal; we could finally tape things. Do you even know what a VCR is? A tape recorder? These are historical objects that meant a lot to us.

We watched TV commercials. We watched reruns on purpose because there weren’t that many choices on TV.

It’s like we were living in the wild.

We made mixed tapes of songs from the radio using a tape recorder. A mixed tape was the most romantic gift you could give a significant other. Have you even heard of the radio? It's like a podcast that runs live 24 hours a day, with commercial breaks.

That was where we got our music from, we just listened as D.J.'s played random songs that we were never allowed to pick unless we called the radio station on our landline telephone from home and waited until they took our call, and then set our tape recorders up to tape the song on a cassette tape.

We had that kind of time.

I’m going to say this, but I suggest you sit down, breathe in and out. There was a time when we didn’t have remote controls. I know. I know. How? How could it have been so? I know.

We had to physically lift our bodies up from a sitting position in order to change the channel. We literally had to walk to the TV. And there were only like four channels. There were not even buttons; there were dials. What is a dial, you ask? That’s a lesson for another day.

I’m sorry to have to tell you all this.

It hurts me more than it hurts you.

This is where we came from, you nitwits.

There was a world, a life before we lost ourselves to screens and devices and social media. The President didn’t tweet for a living; instead, he read books and spoke in grammatically correct sentences.

So maybe for a second, let’s step away from the devices and talk to the people in the room. How’s your screentime been since the quarantine? Don’t want to talk about it? I know, I’m right there with you.

I’m going to go take a walk and throw my smartwatch in the river.

I’m smarter than this. So are you.

How about this, kids? How about you all decide you are not going to party like it's 1999? It's 2020, and you have enough gadgets to keep you occupied right in your own bedrooms for the rest of the century. Let the rest of us live. How about you hang out in your little digital worlds that are so much better than our world ever was? How about you take a moment to contemplate how good you have it?

I teach kids your age in college, and I'm friends with a lot of your parents. How about you show us a little respect for what we have gone through, a life without all the luxuries that you now have? And if you want us all to get through this, use the technology you are so lucky to have to entertain yourselves instead of trying to find excuses to leave the house.

Stay home.

Sincerely,

nina