i’m part of the problem

that screen shit is addictive…

…i’ve already failed today.

i was curious, after watching a video about growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, if i could go a day without my phone and realized not only i couldn’t, but ultimately shouldn’t have to. it talked about none of us having phones back then, but that’s kinda bullshit. lance got his first cell phone (truck mounted) the same day we went to see the class of 1990 graduate lockhart high school. i dragged ass and didn’t follow along until 1994 or so, but that was a totally portable motorola and followed two pagers, one of which was alphanumeric so i could receive “text messages”.

yeah, you could “text” me back in 1992. i was that guy. still couldn’t land a girlfriend after a six pack and a dare, but never mind that now.

we tease gen z and millennials about being screen addicted, but many of us are almost as bad. i do have my “no go” zones, for the most part. i really don’t text when i drive (but had to break myself of the habit), and in the gym i check in with my phone, start my playlist, and put it back in my pocket for the duration of my workout unless, god forbid, somebody calls during the workout. if that happens, it announces in my earbuds who it is, and if i deem them worthy (typically not), i pick up…but i honestly don’t know how (or if) that can happen with my earbuds, so i just pull out the phone and answer with the screen.

i mean, if you wanna baby step backwards, first try switching back to wired earbuds in the gym versus bluetooth, and see how long it takes before that cord gets on your fucking nerves. i’d maybe make it to the third exercise before i tapped. but i jumped on that pretty early, too.

i remember reading an article on the technology coming out of sweden back on my first flight to vegas in 1999. within a year or three i had my first headset, complete with a two inch dongle on a coiled cord you plugged into your mini-plug port on your phone (it was almost the same size as my samsung flip) but had a range that was crystal clear throughout the whole house. it took YEARS before the range of standard phone bluetooth matched that dongle.

but i don’t know if i could (or would) go a day without my phone. i’ve found that in my lifetime evolution has been almost equally biological and technological. and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does beg the question as to whether or not the skynet situation is on the horizon, you know? i don’t do chat gpt because i feel it kills creativity (and that’s been backed by science, not “science.com”), and i don’t do tik tok because i’d like to make it at least semi-challenging for the chinese to get my info and i’m an old white guy so i could honestly care less about it.

i have a good friend, who’s a professional tattoo artist, who uses chat gpt…but almost every project he’s done with it (i don’t know if he uses it for tattoos, but i’d like to think not because he’s pretty gifted artistically; but he does use it for graphic design) and almost every project hits a wall that he solves by sending me screen shots, i drop the images in photoshop, and fix it for him and send it back. so real intelligence is, at least for now, needing to be used to get the ball over the goal line from the artificial shit. hopefully this continues so we don’t totally become dependent on our robot overlords.

sometimes it doesn’t suck to be old, but that’s about to change when i go to get out of this chair on a chilly morning…