If everyone in the past was so great, why are they all dead now?

Stop complaining that no one uses land phones anymore. Stop complaining that no one writes letters. Stop complaining that people have bad handwriting. Stop complaining that people don’t look at each other on the subway. Stop complaining that it isn’t okay to let strangers give your kids candy. Stop complaining about how it’s the future and you miss the past.

If I brought back this computer to a 10th century scribe, painstakingly handwriting bibles or what have you, he would not be bemoaning the loss of the “Art of calligraphy” in the future. No, he would be shitting bricks because I had a magic fucking box that could reduce his workload from a matter of years to a matter of days. He would not be crying about how no one meets face to face anymore: he would be moved to tears by the fact that he could talk to someone in a place he had never even been as if he were meeting them face to face.

I love history, but the future is fucking incredible, and we need to shut up and realize that. Things like typewriters and snail mail letters are fun little affectations for us (and I fully support fun little affectations), but we should thank our goddam lucky stars every day that we do not ever HAVE to use these things. We don’t have to wait a month to know that our mother died, we don’t have to wait a month for vital medicine to arrive, we don’t have to spend weeks typesetting the pages of books before they are printed, we don’t have to take hourlong trips to go see each other just to see how each other is doing. Just because we think it’s somehow aesthetically pleasing doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

I am partially so worked up about this because my life is made possible by technology: literally, I’m a diabetic, who also uses an insulin pump. I am very glad it does not take thirty minutes of boiling to test my blood sugar, and I am very glad that I have enough insulin to keep living. If we were all being moral and old fashioned and tipping our hats to each other on the street: I would be dead. Stop looking backwards.