“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”
— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)
the classic Finnish mix of extreme dutifulness and “we will make actual conversation after a silent interaction trial period of 6 weeks, thank you” can be really funny sometimes. told my coworker that I’d like to save the coffee grounds the workplace generated and take them home “for my mushrooms and worms” and she was just like “okei” and dutifully saved every single grounds-filled filter for weeks and weeks. about five weeks into this whole thing, after I thank her for the coffee grounds and tell her my worms must love them because they’re breeding very enthusiastically, she finally asks “so your worms… do they have a purpose or are they just… worms”. like sure I’ll save you all these coffee grounds every single time I drink coffee, 3+ times a day, but god forbid I inquire about your specific worm habits before propriety allows it. you could be eating them for breakfast for all I know but that’s your business
this post has been up for so long I’m at a new workplace now, and here’s a new one: someone finally getting a close enough look at the jar of homemade nut butter I’d been using to make snacks for days (in a reused jar, still with the pesto label on it), realising the contents were not as advertised, and saying with poorly concealed relief “ai!!! you weren’t spreading pesto on bananas!” like she’d been quietly dying inside the whole time but had grimly committed herself to never ever presuming to ask wtf was going on
we were the liminal kids. alive before the internet, just long enough we remember when things really were different.
when i work in preschools, the hand signal kids make for phone is a flat palm, their fingers like brackets. i still make the pinky-and-thumb octave stretch when i “pick up” to respond to them.
the symbol to save a file is a floppy disc. the other day while cleaning out my parents’ house, i found a collection of over a hundred CDs, my mom’s handwriting on each of them. first day of kindergarten.playlist for beach trip ‘94. i don’t have a device that can play any of these anymore - none of my electronics are compatible. there are pieces of my childhood buried under these, and i cannot access them. but they do exist, which feels special.
my siblings and i recently spent hours digitizing our family’s photos as a present for my mom’s birthday. there’s a year where the pictures just. stop. cameras on phones got to be too good. it didn’t make sense to keep getting them developed. and there are a quite a few years that are lost to us. when we were younger, mementos were lost to floods. and again, while i was in middle school, google drive wasn’t “a thing”. somewhere out there, there are lost memories on dead laptops. which is to say - i lost it to the flood twice, kind of.
when i teach undergrad, i always feel kind of slapped-in-the-face. they’re over 18, and they don’t remember a classroom without laptops. i remember when my school put in the first smartboard, and how it was a huge privilege. i used the word walkman once, and had to explain myself. we are only separated by a decade. it feels like we are separated by so much more than that.
and something about … being half-in half-out of the world after. it marks you. i don’t know why. but “real adults” see us as lost children, even though many of us are old enough to have a mortgage. my little sister grew up with more access to the internet than i did - and she’s only got 4 years of difference. i know how to write cursive, and i actually think it’s good practice for kids to learn too - it helps their motor development. but i also know they have to be able to touch-type way faster than was ever required from me.
in between, i guess. i still like to hand-write most things, even though typing is way faster and more accessible for me. i still wear a pj shirt from when i was like 18. i don’t really understand how to operate my parents’ smart tv. the other day when i got seriously injured, i used hey siri to call my brother. but if you asked me - honestly, i prefer calling to texting. a life in anachronisms. in being a little out-of-phase. never quite in synchronicity.
I imagine that the last generation to really feel this way, to really feel a before-and-after kind of world, was at the last turn of the century, which had 3 huge, life-changing inventions happen all at once.
In 1890, everybody rode horses, used candles to see at night, and communicated through letters.
By the 1920s (only 30 years later!), everybody had automobiles (or access to another form of 'self-driving’ transportation like busses or trams) and nobody had horses. Nearly everyone had electricity in their houses. Nearly everyone had a telephone, or access to one.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine growing up, being taught by your parents all about how to ride horses and care for them and hitch them to a wagon, only to…not ever use that knowledge as an adult, because you have a car? Can you imagine learning how to make candles, finally getting good enough at it to be useful to your family as a teenager, only to flick a switch to turn on a light bulb as an adult?
I feel like that last huge change in technology is the same thing we are going through. I know how to read a paper map. I will never need to use this knowledge. But it’s still in there; including the many patient hours my mother spent teaching me, and a lot of fond memories I have of her doing it. I know how to research a topic in a paper library, with actual books. Pretty sure I will never do that again. I memorize phone numbers, 'just in case’. In case what? The automobile (smartphone) gets un-invented? But I hold that knowledge in my head. It’s there. It’s part of me.
I wish I could speak to my great-great-grandmother, who had her first baby in 1900. To ask her, if what Millennials now are going through is what it was like for her Centennial generation. The absolute whiplash, from one way of life to another.
Kids born in 1890 knew how to make candles, and kids born in 1920 could not fathom why you would need to know this.
899-5204.
That’s my grandparents’ number when I was growing up.
You’ll notice it only has seven digits. If they were still alive, that phone line still in service, that number still wouldn’t reach them. It’s not long enough. But I remember tapping it in and the sound it made so clearly I could still hum it back to you today. I remember when it sounded just a teensy bit wrong and I was very confused, and when a man I didn’t know picked up I said “um, is my Grampa there?” and he said “who’s your Grampa?” and by some hilarious coincidence, 898-5204 was the number for my Grampa’s job.
My brain still expects Queen songs to skip when I’m listening on Spotify because I grew up with a scratched and damaged CD and I still know where all the glitches were and if you ask me how to fix a video game my first thought is “blow on it” and to this day I can fix a snapped VHS for you (and when did they stop being “tapes” and become “VHS” and when did all our VCRs morph into VHS players?) if you can give a bright light, a razorblade, and some scotch tape, and if the internet disappeared tomorrow I’d go get a phone book and look up my state rep in the blue pages to complain.
My niblings go to the bathroom differently than me when watching TV. I always go where the commercial break is (or would have been, if I’m watching an anime or old show on streaming). They go between episodes and I had to explain to them what a “commercial break” was because neither of them has ever lived in a world where you couldn’t just skip the ads. We’re twenty years apart and also centuries. The younger one wanted to play Roblox with me when I went to visit and as we worked our way through this absolutely hellish puzzle it occurred to me that when I was growing up it was considered revolutionary if you could make your game look 3D because all the systems were still actually 2D, and this puzzle was so fiendish—to me, not to her, she breezed through it like it was nothing—because it was the other way around, 3D masquerading as 2D. I remembered my mom struggling with the N64 and giving it up as a bad job while eight-year-old me quickly adapted and I wonder if me jumping from MarioKart to Roblox is what it was like for her, jumping to MarioKart from Pong.
The kids all have Tamagotchis again now, but HitClips have come and gone and so have iPods. In my first classroom we had maps of the Soviet Union because there was a waiting list for new supplies that said “Russian Federation” instead, and today there are “smart whiteboards” where you can interact with a projector like it’s a computer and get up-to-the-minute information. Is this why my teenage coworkers look at me weird when I say “blackboard chalk”? Did a decade and a half really change that much? Even the internet I knew growing up, the weird and wild and wonderful and new thing everyone was losing their minds over, is like a lost country under the desert. If I say “I was on a mailing list for a Geocities fanfiction webring,” that probably sounds like straight Babylonian to almost anyone on this site younger than me. Whenever I talk about my early internet days I have to explain COPPA wasn’t in effect yet and that’s how I was doing all this stuff at eleven years old without lying about my age. Sometimes when I see somebody blow a red light I’ll yell “the river is too deep for your oxen to ford, motherfucker” and wonder if any version of that game even still exists.
We have crossed a bridge of time, and when we set foot on wires and silicon cables the builders of that brave new world set fire to the wooden structure behind us.
