Hey.
We got drunk in the truest sense of the word! I risk repeating an old video in which a comedian talked about how a person is outraged by the quality of the Internet when he flies on an airplane. Across the sky! Flies! And he is outraged! But there is no escape, the wonders of our civilization seem familiar and eternal to us, both are delusions. Wherever you stick, and even some hundred years ago, things we are used to simply did not exist for ordinary people, were a wonder for the elite. I get up in the morning and get into the shower, turn the knob, and the thermostat gradually heats the water to the desired temperature and increases the pressure. A hundred years ago, an ordinary shower was not available to most people, and bathrooms remained the lot of a few inhabitants of the planet. You should be lucky for your family to be wealthy enough to afford a bath, as well as to live in a house where there is constant access to water. Although in those days water was already more or less common in large cities, the refrigerator was a curiosity, it was also a measure of your capabilities and wealth.
Yes, the refrigerator, the camera was not available to everyone, and even in my youth it was both a profession and a hobby for many people, and a hobby far from accessible. Even if you received a camera, an enlarger as a gift, the question of film and reagents remained. I inherited the Leningrad-2 enlarger, since my grandfather bought the Leningrad-6, it was the last squeak – angular shapes instead of rounded ones, something incomparable, the dream of any schoolchild. Today, both units look like monsters from the distant past, their aesthetics fall out of the familiar world. Things that were impossible in the past began to surround us in everyday life, just look around and understand that the dreams of science fiction writers have suddenly become a reality. I remember how new trams appeared at the end of the USSR, they looked angular, modern and completely different, a sign of change. The trams that still run along the streets of Moscow are also completely different.
Moscow has somehow casually abandoned trolleybuses, replaced by electric buses, which look and feel like buses, but use electricity to travel. Charges in transport no longer scare us, they look familiar, but couriers use them, other people are almost invisible. Either they disdain, or they have a spare external battery. At bus stops, the story is the same, you can recharge your phone at any time. Transport is very archaic in nature, there is little that can be changed and improved, it takes you from point A to point B.
My morning starts with a simple exercise: an alarm clock peeps at the clock and determines what phase of sleep I have. The interval, which is set for waking up, is enough to put myself in order and come for breakfast, I have a meeting. A week before that, having accepted the invitation in the mail, I immediately received an entry in the calendar, during breakfast the smartphone automatically switches to Do Not Disturb mode, does not distract with notifications. But breakfast is still far away, while you can see the route to the restaurant, in Google maps helpfully draws the best route. By car twenty minutes, by taxi the same, public transport thirty minutes. I understand that Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge is an unpredictable thing and a taxi can let me down, I choose an electric bus, the phone immediately tells me when to get off so as not to miss. My bus is crawling on the map, and I crawl out of the house to the bus stop.
We arrive at the stop at the same time, I am satisfied with the bus, he is hardly with me. A half-empty salon, the validator has no one, a wave of the hand, and the fare has been paid from my watch, a message from the bank immediately comes: “You paid for the fare, cashback will be credited to you at the beginning of next month.” A friend agrees to take a Mir card, but then you have to pay from your phone or from an ordinary bank card, I’m too lazy and don’t want to get some kind of gigantic discount on travel. She has a different calculation, a kind of life experience – she saves a penny a ruble, therefore she pays with a Mir card in the metro, there are some discounts.
I rewind history and remember how they paid for travel in my childhood. I had a travel card, every morning at six in the morning I got up, at 6.30 the bus was already taking me sleepy to training at seven, with the exception of Saturday, you could bask in bed until eight, training began two hours later. The Olympic reserve school sounds cool, but still it was a sport far from high achievements, CCM at 14-15, perhaps a master at sixteen. I remember how happy we were when we were left with a time recording system after the competition, we did our best to see how fast we could swim 200 meters freestyle, as an option, we chose the butterfly style. Today, most smartwatches can automatically detect what you are doing – walking, running, exercising in the gym, cycling, and so on. This is fantastic, which was inaccessible to us in principle, but my children curl their lips and say that in the gym the clock does not always correctly determine the load, working with free weights is far from ideal! An attempt to explain that their watch is a miracle of miracles comes across the usual bewilderment. They have known these technologies since childhood and do not see anything unusual in them.
Technology has turned from a miracle into an everyday thing, and children are surprised when this miracle does not happen. A few years ago my friend’s daughter went to the window and tried to bring the boat closer to the roadstead with a familiar gesture, she wanted to bring it closer! A three-year-old girl could not understand why a window did not work like a tablet. Give time, and this will change, our windows will become “smart”, they will be able to regulate the luminous flux and the way we look at the world.
And how do children who cannot read and write easily bypass Wi-Fi locks and learn to watch cartoons? A friend broke his head, watching a child, who not so long ago learned to speak, easily hacks into Wi-Fi, telling with undisguised pride about the genius of his child. But I was looking for a child to do this trick. Everything turned out to be outrageously simple, the child read to the voice assistant something like “how to watch cartoons if daddy forbade it.” And then I got a hint in the video on how to connect Wi-Fi. Amazing world, don’t you think?
My old acquaintances, guys from San Francisco, sent me TWS headphones, which have a twist, they block the mate that you can hear on the street. The target audience is children, adolescents, in order to protect them from an aggressive environment, for example, in some bad areas. A child listens to music or a podcast, someone swears nearby, and these sounds are simply drowned out by headphones. I don’t think the story will take off, but the guys sincerely believe that they are doing the right thing.
Okay, let’s get back to my morning trip. Even before getting on the bus, I saw that the moon was hanging over the street, it looked beautiful. I took out my smartphone and, without any telescope, photographed the Earth satellite.
I am not the first device that can take pictures of the Moon, for example, in Huawei, images are substituted from specially prepared files, a kind of reality editor. And AI algorithms can do something else. In the same S21 Ultra, the Moon is honest, here the algorithms rather pull out the picture, while you point the camera at the satellite, the picture trembles, it is blurry, and then suddenly becomes sharp, this is where you need to press the shutter.
As a child, he dreamed of a telescope, wanted to look at planets, study the night sky. I saved money and bought an atlas of the night sky, went out onto the balcony and looked at the piece that was available to me, other houses covered part of the sky, and there were also windows that I wanted to extinguish. It was unrealistic to save up for a telescope, but with one of the first salaries I bought this unit for myself, it was lying around somewhere assembled, and there was never a need for it. Rather, with this purchase, he realized his childhood dreams.
I have a smartphone in my pocket (more precisely, even two, but this is not the point), which combines everything that you can think of. Anywhere and at any time I can take a picture, capture the surrounding reality. And I like it, because there is no need, as before, to carry a camera, there are no restrictions in the form of film, there are no limits in color and possibilities. Photography has become widespread, publicly available, if you want to create – then create, the cost of entering this world has disappeared. I remember my childhood, and nostalgia sneaks through, then it was a whole story that has disappeared today.
Technology makes available many things that used to be fantastic. I made an appointment with a dermatologist, the nurse calls and asks what the reason for the call is. The reason is trivial, there are either pigment spots, or something else, small painted areas of the skin, I’m worried. The girl asks to take pictures, she will show them to the doctor. Fifteen minutes later, the call – everything is fine, it looks like you changed your shaving cream or cologne, you have irritation. It looks unpleasant, but you have our recommendations in your mail on how to remove this annoyance. If it does not help, then we signed you up in five days, we will contact you the day before to confirm the visit.
Where are the queues? Where is the expectation of a verdict, as in previous years, when there were worries, what with you and what to do about it? Today, even for taking tests, you can order a home nurse, and you can do the tests yourself if anonymity is important to you. In the era of a pandemic, those who make tests for the virus make excellent money, they fly like hot cakes. Some organizations cannot get into without a fresh test, so you have to constantly do them and demonstrate your purity. But the convenience is that you can do it at home!
I will not recall how the digital world has changed many services. You can pay for electricity, water, utilities from anywhere. That’s no problem at all. As well as the “smart home” allows you to monitor your farm from anywhere in the world.
Okay, let’s talk about learning the world and foreign languages. Studied in an English special school, in-depth study of the language and everything that is supposed to. The level of education in the USSR was not bad, but we did not have the opportunity to listen, watch films, read the latest press. Today, all this and even more is available in unprecedented volumes. As well as the Internet contains such a volume of information that no Lenin’s library can compare with it. There would be a desire to reach for something interesting, but here the problem is that the world has spoiled us and this desire does not arise. We sincerely got drunk, because we are not surprised by what we see around us, we take it for granted.
Anyone motivated to learn receives invaluable resources, the opportunity to improve their level of knowledge in almost any field. It was impossible to think of anything like that twenty years ago. How do we feel about this today? Disdainful. This is considered the norm. It has become habitual. We are tired of technological miracles and once recently made the decision that any miracle was to be expected. This approach played a cruel joke on us, now nothing surprises us. We do not freeze in admiration of the achievements of our civilization, because tomorrow someone will block these records. Something new and different does not make our heart beat faster, as we expect miracles to happen.
The most valuable thing in any person is the ability to be surprised, and it is difficult not to lose it in our world. Many of my friends claim that I amaze them with the fact that I am interested in digging into pieces of iron, doing something with them, communicating with different people and, most importantly, continuing to burn with this idea. For me, it has not become a routine when you need to go to the next text on duty and give out a certain number of characters. Perhaps that is why I am happy with something new, sad from repeating what I have gone through and am sharing this on the pages of our site. But it’s not about me and my predilections, but about the current situation in general. We need to learn to wonder again and dream about something unattainable. After all, when you get the impression that everything is possible and someone realizes it, it means that you will not become that someone. Only by dreaming and setting unattainable goals can we expand the boundaries of the possible. The bad news is that we stopped dreaming, and technological progress has become something familiar, to some extent something conservative. Having become stiff, we lose interest in life, in the miracles that are happening around. Everything becomes boring, it becomes dull.
Let’s refresh your impressions, play a game. Come to your parents and grandparents, talk to them about how they lived, how their world was arranged. In the little things and familiar things – where they went for food, how they communicated with each other and with friends who lived in the same city or far away. Find out what seems familiar to you, but in fact has changed in one generation, has become completely different. Even in the life of my generation, the level of change is such that it will last for several lives, different habits and systems replace each other constantly. Life is changing dramatically, and we have become part of these changes. Talk to your loved ones, remember how it all was and how it is now. I am sure that the stories will surprise you and show you how different everything is here and now. Just think about it, be surprised next time what we as humanity were able to do and how beautiful and sublime it is.
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