Why do I feel more like a Middle Age monk than a middle-aged man? After all, I am healthy, active and in excellent physical condition. I have a superb memory that stores thousands of words in four languages, not to mention poems by Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and William Shakespeare, to name but a few. Why, then, do I feel outdated? Perhaps it is the world that has aged faster than I.
It is not that I feel old, I just think things are so much different than when I was a young man. I have realized that when I think of my age in terms of the changes I have seen in my life, I feel much older than I do when I count the number of years I have been treading on this beautiful Earth. Let me tell you how old I am in social change time.
First my childhood. I grew up watching the original Superman and Zorro on a black-and-white television. In my adolescence, I listened to Pink Floyd long plays (vinyl) on a record player I had to clean off the needle every so often in order to get mediocre sound quality.
As a young man traveling abroad, I went from the ticketing counter straight to my seat on the airplane, without passing through any metal detectors or any kind of personal inspection–and I felt absolutely safe. My idea of bioterrorism was when Julie French-kissed me in the schoolyard when she knew she had strep throat. And whenever I overheard someone saying “it’s getting warmer every day,” I rejoiced at the approach of summer rather than fret about some ecological disaster.
But things have changed, dramatically.
Today, children who are not squandering their precious time in front of a 62-inch color television watching mind-numbing entertainment, are glued to their computer monitor playing video games, some of which can make the most hideous television show look innocuous in comparison.
Adolescents listen to music in sophisticated portable devices, cook meals in microwave ovens, and socialize with friends on their personal cell phones while on a lonely walk. And yet, in spite of all these technological gadgets at their disposal, their lives are not any better or more fun than my generation’s, and certainly not safer.
The truth is that the world is not the same. Air travel has become a worrisome adventure that can turn into a nightmare, which makes me not want to go anywhere. The idea of hot weather, rather than warming my heart with joy, evokes terribly disturbing images of penguins from the Antarctic showing up on the tropical beaches of Rio de Janeiro.
And yes, the Cold War is over and I no longer have to worry about the “evil empire,” though the nukes and a growing arsenal of weapons of mass destruction are still widespread. Instead, I dread the globalization of savage capitalism, in which excessive greed and selfishness further separate individuals and nations, while increasing the risk of international conflict.
Indeed, we have made extraordinary scientific and technological progress in the twentieth century. Within a mere one hundred years, we went from wagons powered by horses to spacecraft powered by nuclear energy; from bicycles to airplanes, and from the telegraph to the Internet.
On the other hand, in the emotional and spiritual development realm, we seem to have regressed. Two brutal world wars and barbaric atrocities against humanity made the twentieth century one of the most violent in human history.
While intellectual capability evolved at an astonishing pace, other equally important modes of intelligence remained stagnant, and in some cases even degenerated. While the cities became illuminated by electric light engineered by scientific intelligence, the human spirit has been left behind in the darkness of spiritual and emotional ignorance.
As I observe a world where there is growth without development, freedom without responsibility, democracy without justice, and rhetoric without meaning, I realize that there are many very old patterns time has not been able to change. Maybe time has gone nowhere. And yet, how did the world and its people manage to change so quickly?
At least I now realize that it is not a personal aging issue, but a collective sociological drama of which I am a part. It is the world, not I, who got older so fast. Unfortunately, it did not get wiser in the process of aging.