Is this what it feels like to grow old[er]?

I imagine, that this is what it felt like for people who had only known how to walk with their bare feet when they had to squeeze their toes into alignment and pad them with leather into what is now an indispensable clothing item called shoes. This is what it must have felt like for those whose overseas communication had only meant the post office to speak on the telephone. My grandfather used to always ask with a spark of joy and excitement, “Are you really in South Africa? Right at this moment that you are speaking to me? Are you really there? You are lying to me!” [translated from my local dialect].

We were the dot.com generation. Our parents called us ‘computer wizards’ because we knew how to start and shut down a desktop computer. Our first encounters with computers are documented in the Word Art pictures we saved and the bright bold three dimensional fonts we experimented with in Microsoft Word. Yet now future children may never need to know how to write. Why will they write in a book with a pencil when then can just type it out in clear standard handwriting on a glass screen?

Within the same lifetime that personal computers and mobile phones went from thought to tangible, from experimental to mass market, an even more complex mode of technology has emerged- Artificial Intelligence. With a handful of brains on the earth, an information and command system has developed that could potentially handle the workload of millions of brains and of hundreds of hours in just a few minutes. Some quantum theorists are promising that “the ones and zeros that created the worldwide web might soon become an abacus”. I do not even know what this really means at all, technically.

“It is what the train did to horses and what the light bulb did to candles.” It feels inevitable.

To live 100 years is strange. What was impossible at the beginning of a century might become commonplace at the end of the same century. Racial segregation was once public, accepted and enforced by law but has been relegated to a privately held view and as morally incorrect when it is publicly exposed. People for whom it was once impermissible to sit side by side in a classroom setting with some others, have now seen their children hold professions they themselves had not dreamed of ever being allowed to have.

When COVID came and shut down the way we did everyday life, we were told by our elders that this was not the first time the ‘world’ was being shut down. Though this time, because of how interconnected the world has become, a patient zero in Wuhan can pause life everywhere. It was a pandemic!

After the pandemic, many millennials are reported to have resigned from their corporate jobs. It was called the great resignation. Being absorbed into a big corporate organisation was once considered the height of professional success. It was the safe secure path to financial and career success. After the pandemic, many corporate workers re-evaluated the ‘9 to 5’ (the 8 to 5.30). They questioned why they had to come in to an office building to work, why they had to attend meetings in person or even wear suit bottoms for those meetings.

Furthermore, now that millennials are parents, the current psychological premise of parental ineptitude causing life long trauma no longer sounds wholesomely without flaws. Millennial parents have since been reporting experiencing ‘trauma’ like feelings arising from [raising] their children.

This is how it feels. Sometimes it feels like the world is evolving faster than we can comprehend. Sometimes it feels like the old way was better. Why are the children being taught sounds instead of the alphabet. What is wrong with school uniforms?

Sometimes it also feels like some things should evolve faster; like what it means to go to driving school, take a driving test and then have a permit less soul climb onto a two wheeled vehicle, enter a highway, grab passengers along the way, without ever having studied a traffic light, heard of the standard look left, right and left again protocol or even caught a whisper of the concept of right of way. While in other countries, you can actually fail a driving test, multiple times!

Even though driving school was not legitimate and for many of us, our real driving lessons were from our parents [and some people from taxi drivers], we at least had a semblance of it. Passing driving school and getting a permit is like most things, it goes to whoever can pay with money. Although some driving school instructors make it clear that female students may pay in some other way. It is another one of those things here that, if you are too eager to do it properly, the system will punish you for not conforming. “Do you really think you can operate a manual car?” “You really think you can pass the reverse parking test? ” “You will fail and lose all the money you paid.” … Someone I was born with was once thrown in a police cell for quoting a traffic law to a traffic police officer.

Growing older makes you think about things like, why do we always have low standards for ourselves? The rest of the world is courting us, trying to recruit us for all purposes both good and evil but we still don’t see our value. We don’t have boundaries. We take whatever we are given and try to mutate it into an African purpose, deleting traditional structures, creative skills, musical instruments, stories, languages, dressing, agricultural and animal rearing practices, professional skills, talents and even colour because someone else supplanted it with their own. At least, the thought patterns that led us there could be taken into account or were our ancestors completely useless?

Growing older also makes you realise that you might be the last generation to speak your mother tongue.

… From mathematicians to scientific calculators, from Erikson to Apple, from Facebook to Metaverse, from google to Chat GPT. Maybe it’s like evolution, if the climate changes, sometimes you lose your fur and become an elephant.

Do village churches know what they sound like discordantly blasting their donated keyboards at every interlude? Don’t they realise that maybe drums and buchenche are more suitable to that style of music?

…

Our children will never know about or even consider the dominant national primary schools of our day when we first prepared to attend primary school. None of them exists now, some razed down and most others so substantially untenable that they in essence really do not exist.