Most people under 40 years old spent their holidays fixing their parents and grandparents computers and trying to teach them things about new devices – facing down the inevitable resistance of the older generation to change. They say that they like the old ways better and do not want new things, all while depending on younger people to actually make possible various labor-saving devices that enable ever better communication. (This is not a universal of course, just a tendency.)
It’s been this way for some ten years now. I’ve variously wondered if this is a new problem or something that goes on throughout all of human history.
I’m reading One of Ours by Willa Cather, set in the days before World War I, post-frontier and pre-modernity, and running across exactly the same thing. The younger generation was forcing the older generation to look at cars, washing machines, butter churners, irons, and the like, while the older generation was dogmatically sticking to their old ways and decrying the uselessness of the new gadgetry– while secretly depending on young people to take them everywhere and make the butter and wash and iron the clothes.
