I was driving around early this morning, enjoying the rare peace of a Saturday before the rest of the world woke up and started looking at their screens. That is when I saw it, hanging from a massive oak tree in a front yard down the road: a tire swing. My 58-year-old heart did a little backflip. A real, honest-to-goodness tire swing! I immediately flashed back to my childhood, remembering the smell of hot, sun-baked rubber, the inevitable black smudge left on your jeans, and that slight element of danger when you realized the rope was frayed. For a brief second, I felt a surge of hope. Maybe the kids these days were alright. Maybe we were reclaiming our heritage.
Naturally, I pulled my truck over to get a closer look and savor the nostalgia. I rolled down the window, squinted through my progressives, and that’s when the crushing disappointment set in. It wasn’t a tire. It was a molded, hollow piece of black plastic *shaped* like a tire. A replica. A sanitized, safety-tested, UV-resistant imposter. It didn't have the weight, it didn't have the character, and I’m ninety-nine percent sure it didn't even have any actual rainwater pooling in the bottom with a colony of mosquitoes. It was a fake, meant to look like the real thing without any of the soul.
As I drove away, shaking my head like the old man I am rapidly becoming, it hit me that this plastic tire is the perfect mascot for the modern world. It seems like everything isn't real anymore. We are surrounded by clever imitations of things that used to have substance. Take dinner, for instance. Fast food has completely replaced real, slow-cooked food. We pull up to a glowing menu board, speak into a microphone, and receive a bag of chemically engineered satisfaction that was assembled in twelve seconds flat. It looks like a burger, it sort of tastes like a burger, but we all know it’s just a highly efficient food replica.
And don’t even get me started on how we connect with each other. Social media has completely replaced actually talking to people. We don’t drop by a friend's porch to shoot the breeze or split a lukewarm soda anymore; we just hit a little thumb-up icon on a screen to let them know we acknowledge their existence. We look at curated, filtered replicas of people’s lives while sitting alone in the dark. We’re "connected" to five thousand people, yet if our car broke down on the side of the highway, we’d hesitate to call any of them because it might disrupt their scrolling.
It feels like a slow, quiet eviction where all the authentic things are being wheeled out the back door while we aren't looking, replaced by lightweight, mass-produced stand-ins. Now, all we have left are memories about how it used to be. We remember when wood was heavy, when milk came in glass, and when your knees were permanently stained with grass. We hoard these recollections like currency, trading them with other people our age just to prove to ourselves that we didn't dream up a better version of reality.
But then I have to ask myself: is this just the way it is with every single generation? Was my old man standing on the porch in 1983, looking at my digital watch and sighing for the lost artistry of gears and springs? Maybe every generation is doomed to watch the things they loved turn into plastic replicas, while the younger crowd swings on their hollow black tires, perfectly content, having no idea what a real piece of Goodyear rubber feels like flying through the air. Still, I can't help but wish things didn't change quite so fast—or at least, that they’d leave us a little more of the real stuff to hold onto.
ReplyDeleteAfter AI takes over, will people reminisce about how a post written by a real person appeared on the Wannaskan Almanac every morning?
I hope not.
The Wannaskan what? I think that if we weren't so 'every morning' more people'd start paying attention, you know like THE RAVEN it is said to have replaced in 2018; that was published so irregularly people began missing it after a few month or so. I have yet to have someone ask me, "Hey, you still writing a blogpost for that daily local media marvel, the Wannaskan Almanac? I'm missing Squareman's Squibbies, the Thesaurus's from Beltrami, Tea Pottery, the Gun Slinger from Dodge City, Hruba's Handfull of Helpful Hints, the Palmville Globe bit -- and what was it you wrote? Nevermind. Whatever happened to that wonderfully creative venture? Wait a minute, was that AI?
ReplyDelete