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Let me address Greenspun's 50-year-old friend, who says: I have been declared inept by my household! It only gets worse. You are not judged by your intelligenc

Let me address Greenspun's 50-year-old friend, who says: I have been declared inept by my household! It only gets worse. You are not judged by your intelligence but by how well you do menial tasks. I have been spiritually castrated. I am a walking corpse. The only freedom is when I write. Look: Google did not cause your midlife crisis. If you can't live your own life, finding happiness in your own work (whatever it is) and not worry about how other people "judge" you, that is too bad, and you're not the only one (they didn't invent the term "midlife crisis" by accident) but don't blame information technology. Old people, as a class, probably are valued less than they used to be, but the trend is far bigger and older than Google. Part of it is that there just are a lot more old people around than there used to be. Part of it (as others have said here) is that in a literate society books and recordings can substitute for the old person's job of remembering things -- but that trend is a thousand years old and more. Part of it is the change in family size and migration patterns: Let's face it, other people's kids have always been less likely to honor you than your own kids, and it's hard to be respected by your kids if they lead independent lives many miles away. And a lot of it is just the nature of American culture: The American ideal is someone who is always moving, looking forward, and reinventing themselves. We've always been big on the young: They're the ones with the most future, and it's all about the future! None of which is causing your midlife crisis either. If you think it's miserable to be a healthy middle-class 50-year-old in the 21st-century USA, you need counseling.[1] Because I'll bet you wouldn't actually trade places with a random 50-year-old in, say, the 17th century: Perhaps you'd be more honored and respected for your venerable wisdom, but you'd also probably be a subsistence farmer, honored mainly to the extent that you managed to have a lot of kids and keep them alive. Before you complain that nobody listens to you anymore, try and think about the 6.5 billion people in the world who have less voice than you do: Less money, less education, less political power, less opportunity. [2] --- [1] Probably from someone older than you. ;) [2] Given that we're talking about a friend of Greenspun, 6.5 billion is almost certainly a gross underestimate. Think "the population of the Earth, minus epsilon".

raganwald 17y ago
If you think it's miserable to be a healthy middle-class 50-year-old in the 21st-century USA, you need counseling. There are lots of unhappy people in the First World. Telling them that they should be happy because of how much worse things could be is the equivalent of telling a child to eat their broccoli because there are starving children in Africa. I liked your comment enough to upmod it, but this argument struck me as being considerably less insightful than the (excellent) rest.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  I agree completely. When I say "you need counseling", I'm not trying to be flip. Seriously: If you're having a crisis, you need counseling. You don't need to look all over the world for some sort of grand, sweeping, half-baked objective theory for your unhappiness ("information technology is making my life miserable"). Instead you need to look much closer. You need to talk to friends, loved ones, psychologists, career counselors, priests... whatever. Unhappiness is not an easy problem to solve, logic won't solve it for you, and the answer is as likely to be something trivial and personal as it is something grand and sweeping. My writing appears to be a total failure today, not surprisingly. [1] I'm not trying to offer up objective reasons for why one should be happy because I expect them to convince anyone to be happy. Of course that won't work! Happiness doesn't work that way. I'm offering them up as a counterexample to the idea, implicit in the original essay, that one's unhappiness at age 50 is necessarily related to some large-scale objective trend. It isn't. Because, I'd argue, large-scale objective trends suggest that a healthy middle-class American 50-year-old should be on top of the world. And yet many of them are unhappy anyway. I'm sorry about that, but I see no reason to believe it's Google's fault. --- [1] I should note, for the record, that I'm fighting the swine flu, and I'd have a 102-degree fever right now if it weren't for the awesome power of modern drugs. ;)
  - raganwald 17y ago
    Get well soon.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- jseliger 17y ago
  <i>There are lots of unhappy people in the First World.</i> Yeah. They should read Daniel Gilbert's book _Stumbling on Happiness_.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    I have never heard of the book. Is this a serious suggestion?
jamesbritt 17y ago
"We've always been big on the young: They're the ones with the most future, and it's all about the future!" We've been big on the young since they became the largest demographic. As that shifts, so does the attention. I see far more products and services offered for the AARP crowd than I ever have.

raganwald 17y ago

If you think it's miserable to be a healthy middle-class 50-year-old in the 21st-century USA, you need counseling. There are lots of unhappy people in the First World. Telling them that they should be happy because of how much worse things could be is the equivalent of telling a child to eat their broccoli because there are starving children in Africa. I liked your comment enough to upmod it, but this argument struck me as being considerably less insightful than the (excellent) rest.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
I agree completely. When I say "you need counseling", I'm not trying to be flip. Seriously: If you're having a crisis, you need counseling. You don't need to look all over the world for some sort of grand, sweeping, half-baked objective theory for your unhappiness ("information technology is making my life miserable"). Instead you need to look much closer. You need to talk to friends, loved ones, psychologists, career counselors, priests... whatever. Unhappiness is not an easy problem to solve, logic won't solve it for you, and the answer is as likely to be something trivial and personal as it is something grand and sweeping. My writing appears to be a total failure today, not surprisingly. [1] I'm not trying to offer up objective reasons for why one should be happy because I expect them to convince anyone to be happy. Of course that won't work! Happiness doesn't work that way. I'm offering them up as a counterexample to the idea, implicit in the original essay, that one's unhappiness at age 50 is necessarily related to some large-scale objective trend. It isn't. Because, I'd argue, large-scale objective trends suggest that a healthy middle-class American 50-year-old should be on top of the world. And yet many of them are unhappy anyway. I'm sorry about that, but I see no reason to believe it's Google's fault. --- [1] I should note, for the record, that I'm fighting the swine flu, and I'd have a 102-degree fever right now if it weren't for the awesome power of modern drugs. ;)
- raganwald 17y ago
  Get well soon.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jseliger 17y ago
<i>There are lots of unhappy people in the First World.</i> Yeah. They should read Daniel Gilbert's book _Stumbling on Happiness_.
- raganwald 17y ago
  I have never heard of the book. Is this a serious suggestion?

jamesbritt 17y ago

"We've always been big on the young: They're the ones with the most future, and it's all about the future!" We've been big on the young since they became the largest demographic. As that shifts, so does the attention. I see far more products and services offered for the AARP crowd than I ever have.