Thinking Out Loud: Someone to Talk to
It’s easy to underestimate the strength and value of digital friendship
There is no way to totally understand how profound the changes are that the digital world has brought to our lives. Further, it’s hard to remember that we haven’t actually been living in that world for all that long. Of course, “…all that long” is open to definition. Those of us with more gray than color in our hair see the concept of time entirely differently than Gen Z types do. Actually, I’m not even sure what a Gen Z type is. In fact, I just looked it up and this is what I found.
If you figure 80 years is a pretty decent life span and you add that to the upper end of the generations defined below, you get the years the last of each of those generations began, or will begin, to disappear.
Wiki’s definition of the Seven Generations’ birth and death ranges.
Greatest Generation (born 1901-1924) ... Dying 1981 to 2004
Silent Generation (born 1925-1945) ... Dying 2005 to 2025
Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) ... Dying 2026 to 2044
Generation X (born 1965-1980) ... Dying 2045 to 2060
Millennials (born 1981-1996) ... Dying 2061 to 2076
Generation Z (born 1997-2012) ... Dying 2077 to 2092
Generation Alpha (born 2013-2025) …Dying 2093 to 2105
It’s hard to pick an exact date when digits started forming the lifeline between friends, but Apple went into business in 1978, websites got going in ’93 and exploded by ’96. The internet grew right along with the Web. By ’93, when the internet, as we know it, caught on, the youngest Baby Boomers were 50 or better. We’d already lived a lifetime or two and a lot of the much-vaunted Millennials weren’t even born yet. The first of the Millennials (’81-’96) were barely teenagers when computers learned to talk to one another. So, what we’re saying here is that we have a rock-bottom minimum of two generations, Millennials and Zs, that have never known life without the Internet and cell/smart phones. That says a lot about the way they look at life versus the way we gray dogs do. Or did!
Today there isn’t a generation still functioning, even the remaining Silent Generation, who don’t depend on digits for much of their social existence. The current teens carry it to absurd levels but even we high-mileage models can look around and realize how much we’ve changed our social interactions because of computers and smart phones. In its own way that’s good. If a person is, for some reason (health, location, etc), unable to get out into society and would live a solitary life, he/she can still have a life and connect with the world courtesy of digits.
‘Want proof of how much digits have broadened our lives, answer this: How many people do you consider good friends because of years of past conversations but you’ve never actually laid eyes on them? Or you haven’t seen them for years. I’m definitely in that group. I can’t count the number of folks I consider true friends that I don’t even know what color their hair is. What a bunch of us call The Oshkosh Posse, about eight guys who hang out at Oshkosh, communicates several times a week on an informal basis. There’s an interesting aspect to that kind of communication that I hadn’t noticed until I saw it from a different perspective recently. A lot of you will identify with this.
A couple weeks ago, when I was doing the Don’t Let the Old Man In blog, I mentioned that I had lost a good friend that week, Tom Atwood. I sang his praises, meaning every syllable but it wasn’t until the days and weeks passed that I realized there was something more to our relationship. I suddenly found in some ways I had no one to talk to.
First, 200-300 e-mails a day run across my screen so I’m always talking to someone. Some I know, some want something, more are simply political hacks trying to eat up my time and raise my blood pressure. However, it wasn’t until Tom was no longer at his e-mail address that I realized how many times a day I’d run across something that I would automatically forward to him but couldn’t. He was usually doing the same thing and firing stuff my ways. We shared some very narrow interests that on my side, at least, I only had in common with him. He was the only guy I could talk to on a whole bunch of subjects because he was the only one who shared the interest.
IIRC, Tom’s undergraduate degree before going into law school was Anthropology, which Wiki says is “… the study of the origin and development of human societies and cultures.” That one sentence very succinctly summed up the core of one of our very intense shared interests. Of course, we were both into airplanes and history, etc., however we shared a very strong hang up on Paleo-anthropology which Wiki further defines as “…a branch of paleontology and anthropology which seeks to understand the early development of anatomically modern humans, a process known as hominization…” I’m fascinated by the whole field and seek it out as much as possible. I don’t have a lot of airplane friends who want to talk paleo-anthropology. ‘Dunno why.
Wander around my office and house and you’ll keep stumbling over “artifacts”, stuff that may be as cultural as handmade branding irons from the American West, to fossilized buffalo horns and flint work (arrow/lance heads/tools) thousands of years old. There’s a metate (an ancient grinding stone) that was found in a field a few miles from my home in Nebraska on my front doorstep next to a horse hitching post that was one of the last four from the 1880s that had circled the court house in my hometown. When they were taken out in the 1960s, my dad snatched them up, I got one and my brother and sisters got the other three.
I walk past this every time I go into the house. At the bottom is the metate grinding stone bearing the scars of being hit by plows numerous times before someone in the field realized it wasn’t just a rock. Real rocks aren’t common in that part of Nebraska.
Our court house used to be circled by hitching posts like this one. They bulldozed them out and were going to junk the last four but dad grabbed them. An 1800s artifact.
The cream can is from the 1920s/30s when every farmer with cows had a cream separator. They put the raw cream in these cans to be picked up and taken to market. An artifact of another time, another culture. Dad had probably 100 of them. Long story!
Physical artifacts indicative of different cultures at different times for different purposes. Part of paleo-anthropology.
Anything old, odd and interesting would flash back and forth between Tom and me at least a couple times a day. That’s what told me I missed him. In the two weeks since he left us not a day has gone by that I haven’t stumbled across something and, out of habit, think, “Tom would love this.” He was also one of the go-to guys in the country for robotics and AI so lots of the stuff we’d toss back and forth was the exact opposite of ancient. I can’t begin to describe how detailed some of our conversations on EVs, technology, physics and totally obscure energy conversations were. Me, the fossil/arrowhead/old-west aerospace engineering aerobatic airplane freak, he, the accomplished Editor/Anthroologist/robot/Model airplane expert.
So, now I find a major intellectual/conversational gap in my days. He may have been the epitome of the digital friend. I don’t think I’d laid eyes on him in something close to 20 years. However, as is always the case with these kinds of digital relationships, and we all have them, the lack of physical contact means nothing. I even find the way in which my daughter continually sends pix of our California granddaughters, greatly sooths the irritation of being unable to see them more than we do.
As much as I bitch about social media (unfortunately, I’ll be jumping into it next week), it has filled in a a lot of gaps in both time and distance. It, however, can’t leap over death. So, value the time you spend on the computer talking about worthwhile subjects with friends and families. You won’t always be able to do that. bd
You describe something I am experiencing (at 75), more and more everyday.
Thanks! 🙏
Michael Gillespie.
A beautiful piece. I lost my Tom, Tom Speer a year ago. He was my mentor when I got in the FBO business. He was 11 years older and much wiser than I’ll get. The week before he died at 88, he sent me a picture of his Jeepster which he had just finished restoring. We shared being car nuts. We emailed daily. I will miss him until I stop doing anything. Thanks Again BUDD for stirring the brain cells!