When I graduated high school, I already felt like an older soul. I never went out to party a lot. I felt like people who were younger than me, or some people around me didn’t understand the privileges they had. Or how much their lives shouldn’t revolve around their phones.
But when I graduated from college I felt like I most definitely had an old soul. I missed all the things from my childhood, like encyclopedias, and cds. It made me sad that a lot of things were digital now. It makes me sad to think of a future in which my children may never answer a land line phone, or hold a book in person. They might never value the library like I did. They would be interested in instant gratification, liking something and downloading it, living lives on a virtual platform, forgetting the value of interaction without a medium in between.
These thoughts are still in my head and they do make me sad. I loved hanging out before smart phones, before instagram. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of things about modern society, such as skype and this blog and emails.
But I do sort of feel sad for my future children that they won’t get to experience the things I did that made my life and childhood so great.
I’m sure each new generation feels like this, as if the next generation doesn’t appreciate what they had to go through, and the things that the next generation have more freely. So it’s probably nothing new.
And that’s the nature of change, advancement, and progress. It means that we have to leave something behind, move on, and see some things are events of the past. To grow, we have to shed our old notions. It’s a process that requires some pain, some sadness, but growth. It’s a process that remains hopeful that what comes next will be something better. And it’s okay to mourn what gets left behind. It will all still be alive in our memories.