I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore - 82MHz

I recently started thinking about VCRs, as you do. I'll spare you the train of thought that led me to this, but it started with a conversation about worsening eyesight and then it escalated from there.

Anyway, VCRs. I still remember the first VCR my dad bought when I was a kid. And in fact, I remember many times when my dad (and later me, once I had some money of my own) bought a brand new tech device that was state of the art at the time and that we'd never seen or used before.

I remember the first VCR entering our home. And the first microwave oven. The first cordless phone. The first PC (running Windows 95) and a few years later, the Internet. My first CD player. The first time I saw a video being played back from a DVD and how much better it looked than one on VHS. I remember when we had a satellite dish installed on our roof and all of a sudden we had something like 30 TV stations to choose from instead of the five or six we received before that via terrestrial broadcast, and the quality was better, too.

I remember the first wide screen TV my dad bought, and later the first flat screen TV. I remember my first laptop and my first mobile phone. The first mp3 player.

In the first 20 or so years of my life, dozens of new technologies and tech devices entered my life, and I was incredibly excited by all of them, because they all represented progress and they all were an improvement over what we had before.

The cordless phone was better than the one wired into the wall, because now you could go to your room or sit down on the couch and have a phone call there, instead of having to stand in the hallway where the phone was.

DVD was better than VHS. Better quality, no rewinding, the discs didn't wear out and you got tons of extra features on each disc.

CD sounded better than Cassette and Vinyl records. No rewinding, no pops and scratches, no tangled-up tape.

An mp3 player was better than a discman. Smaller, lighter, holds more music. Doesn't require lugging around a bunch of discs.

But in the following 20 years of my life up until today, these instances of discovering some brand new tech that was better than what came before became rarer and rarer. In fact, I only remember two things from the past 10+ years that I started using that were really a brand new product category for me: Smartphones and noise canceling headphones.

Using a smartphone for the first time was pretty amazing, with it's touch screen and the responsive and modern user interface. And it had GPS integrated and a lot of memory so you could store music on it and didn't need to carry a separate mp3 player, you could read your emails and chat with people and take pictures and videos... that was pretty revolutionary. Of course nowadays days I see the downsides of these devices and we're getting to a point where the cons outweigh the pros, but back when I bought the first smart phone (I guess in 2012 or so, I was relatively late to the party) it felt like a leap into the future compared to what I had before.

Noise canceling headphones still blow me away to this day. You put them on in a noisy environment like on a train, turn them on and all of a sudden it's quiet, despite the fact that there's a 750-horsepower diesel engine working at full power right underneath your seat.

But besides that, there isn't a lot of tech in recent years that has fascinated me as much as what became available during the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Everything back then felt like progress, and like moving towards a better future. Nowadays it feels like we're moving towards a worse future and where we were 15 or 20 years ago was perfectly fine and we should have stayed there.

But I wonder if that's just part of me getting older and turning into a grumpy old fart, or if that's a universal feeling. I'm especially curious to know if people who are younger than me, in their 20s today have had the same feelings of wonder and awe when new technology was introduced into their life as I had, or if they feel the same feelings of stagnation and things getting worse that I feel today.

I have a feeling that I know the answer already, because I read a lot of articles about young people rediscovering music cassettes and vinyl records and DVDs and whatnot, and I think if there was new tech to be excited about, they wouldn't get excited about the old stuff. In the 90s, tech from the 60s was dated and boring, while today tech from the 90s seems to see a revival.

But maybe I'm wrong? If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.

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