I like to think that I am now a village elder because I have just turned 50 and at my birthday party the main topic of conversation among my contemporaries was “Ooof!” and “Ouch!” whenever we were getting in and out of chairs. But I think that I am a youthful 50-year-old and that I can still talk to people much younger than myself who are in their 40s and even late 30s.

I listen to them talk about their young people concerns like mortgages and menopause and then they turn to me for the wisdom that comes with my great age, and I say things like, “In my day, we only had two sticks and a piece of string” or “I remember Windows ‘98”. Now that I’m old I can do or say whatever I want whenever I want. I can say something patently dumb like, “I agree with Donald Trump” and nobody can argue with me because I am officially set in my ways. It’s good to finally be a village elder.

But the other day I was talking to a young person (aged 42) and I suddenly felt very old and completely out of touch with the modern world. He was telling me about things called Raspberry Pi, Recalbox and an SD card (which you’ll need to format to FAT32). I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. And then he told me something that made my whole world come crashing down: People don’t watch TV anymore. Instead they use these funny-sounding devices to access a whole world of entertainment for free and whenever they want. As we used to say in my day, OMG!

When I was young if I wasn’t playing with my two sticks and a piece of string then I was watching TV. It had lots of fascinating documentaries like Scooby-Doo and gritty true-to-life dramas like Dynasty. And they were all on TV at set times. I didn’t know it at the time but it was a curated experience where somebody had decided that we should watch these shows at these specific times. Looking back I suppose we were unwitting slaves to a schedule over which we had no control. The schedule made our actions so predictable that in Britain, where I grew up, even the electricity power stations knew that there would be surges in demand during commercial breaks of popular TV shows because millions of people would be switching on their kettles to make tea. 

I guess we were all predictable sheep back then, all waiting for a set time to watch the same TV show and then we would all talk about it the next day. We were all having the same conversation. Now these newfangled devices and the “Intertubes” give us the personal power to choose what we want to watch and when we want to watch it without the interference of the unknown and unseen curator at the TV station. Now I don’t have to wait till 8 pm or 1983 to watch Dynasty. I could watch it right now but I’m not going to. Instead I, and 50 million other people around the world, am going to watch the Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie talk about, well, I actually have no idea what he’s talking about.

Sadly, I have to say RIP TV. TV has been my lifelong friend but now I’ve been told that it is dead. It has been losing its way for some time. The History Channel only has shows about UFOs and how the pyramids were built by aliens, which isn’t what I understand to be history. If things carry on this way then soon a university history course will involve concocting conspiracy theories and when you get your degree, you won’t wear a mortar board on your head but some tin foil so the CIA can’t see what you’re thinking.

Now we can watch what we want and when we want it. We don’t have to sit through anything we don’t like, find boring or disagree with. Finally we have the freedom to only enjoy the things that confirm what we already believed to be the truth. Basically, now everyone has the power to become set in their ways, even at an early age. I guess this way we’ll all become village elders, which doesn’t make me feel so special anymore. Oh well, maybe it’ll be different when I turn 60.

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