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Charles Rosen, via NYRblog: The Lost Pleasure of Browsing (via langer)
I am so tired of old people telling me that I’m missing out on some vital and important part of life, just because I don’t ever smell another person’s pheremones in as many of my interactions.
Listen, old people, you fuckers, you’ve got me over a fucking barrel, you’ve got me paying for your stupid healthcare, inhaling carbon monoxide on a planet you fucked and I could even, possibly blame you for the fact that I don’t have a decent job.
So listen here: Yeah, my life is utterly hollow because I live in a Phillip K. Dick short story but guess what, you Civil War veterans? You never got to deal with all the really interesting shit that goes along with being totally disconnected from reality. You ever think that maybe you’re missing out because you never lived in a world where, say, there’s an entire extra two or three planets overlayed over the world you inhabit? Didja? Do you see me going around, laughing at your amusingly narrow tastes in music, the stupidly homogeonised culture you inhabited, or the charmingly quaint way you understand duplicates and fakes, or the fact that you actually lived in a society that advanced so slowly that it was possible to constantly draw parallels with the past?
No, I fucking don’t. So leave me alone. Look up something called progress. Also something called history, where you will see that idiots like you have been decrying everything as the end of human contact since smoke signals.
And young people! Don’t even get me started on you, you quarter life crisis shit magicians. You’re even worse, because half of you sympathise with the old people. Oh cars looked better in the sixties, love was simpler when you had to get a chaperone, I miss the feel of books, I keep wasting time on the internet. Guess what?!? You would have been just as much a fuck up in the past! Your novel would still suck even if you had a typewriter instead of a laptop! You still wouldn’t be able to find love even if you watched VHS tapes! Everything is different but people are exactly the same. So what if bookstores die out? Fuck them, we’ll get something new. Do you miss video rental stores? Do you really wish there was someone making more cave paintings for you to look at?
This is the future, we made it, exist here regardless of whether it’s “Better” or “Worse” than “The Past” (Spoiler warning: It’s probably neither). Exist here or, if you like how things used to be so much, kill yourself. Seriously. Kill yourself, that way, you can spend eternity stuck in the present, which, oh, whilst you were reading this, just became the past.