Be careful what you wish for

When I was a kid there was no internet. I still remember when it first arrived in South Africa, this box that beeped and spluttered and connected us to an online encyclopedia that I didn't quite understand. Cordless phones were kinda new, I'd only seen them on Dallas and only one friend had a set. One of my first cell phones had an option for SMS but it wasn't active and I didn't quite know what it could do. It seemed revolutionary that I could send a message to a friend who also had a cell phone. But in the movies they did all of these things. 

On a Saturday afternoon I would often walk to the corner store, buy myself a snack, and then spend the afternoon lying on the couch reading a book. Life feels slower then. 

These days I always feel rushed from the minute I wake up till the time my eyes close. I dash between errands, while watching something on TV that I recorded on the PVR. If it's not there I google it and am bound to find it somewhere on the Net. Every 8 seconds I check my phone in case something in the world has changed. During work hours (which is always) I check emails and prioritize which I need to respond to first while watching new ones come in, take phone calls, write reports and switch between open windows, run errands, and check my phone every 8 seconds in case something in the world has changed. And I make coffee. 

When I started at my first job we had an intranet. We could send messages to anyone inside the company. We were not linked to the outside world. For that we used a Fax or Telex. I had a cellphone but it didn't work everywhere. When I travelled I was off the grid. I had a laptop but it was offline when I wasn't at my desk. It was off when I wasn't at my office. 

Imagination is what drives the world. Art imitates life? Or does life imitate art? We dare to dream the future and only through those ideas does the future become reality. 

There are movies that predicted where we would go, like Star Trek or A Space Oddysey. The ideas spurned a world of handheld communication devices and portable tablets. There are those that eerily predicted future events, Super Mario Brothers with the World Trade Center disaster or Poltergeist in the death of its star character via a baseball poster. There are movies that speak to conspiracy theories or alternative ideologies like The Matrix that is supposedly based on real research into the ideas of the parallel universe. 

I don't know about you, but it's been a while since I saw a movie that shook me. Or read a book that enthralled me. It seems that nothing is new and yet everything changes. We are spinning faster than ever before and yet I feel stuck in a race that only gets longer. 

I read somewhere this week that Generation X is giving up on social media. I also read that they are fed up with the millennialis. I have no doubt that some past generation were fed up with the X's too. 

I'm writing this on a tablet in an aeroplane that's about to shoot through the sky. While I write I switch between my email and Facebook and a magazine I am reading while at the same time reminding myself that I downloaded the latest episodes of Shameless and I had better watch them. 

Somewhere in a parallel universe someone is watching me, thinking that the future sure looks exciting. 

42.57