Getting Fired
Exile from the juvenile elite (#punkdraft)
I’m getting fired today. All the signs are in place. I’m twenty-eight years old now and my boss hasn’t taught me anything new for weeks. He has clearly given up on me, lost hope and accepted the basic fact of life: as we get older, our minds decay. Our abilities to cope with speed and pressure fade away, little by little, one day at the time. Our minds become loose, as if they were a worn out bicycle tyre you can’t keep properly inflated anymore. You fill it up, ride it all day, but the next morning it’s all flat again.
It’s how my boss must feel. In last six months he’s been trying so hard. He made it his personal mission to keep me running on acceptable pace. Each morning he took me for a coffee and explained something new to me. He was showing me apps that kids use today and how they talk to each other. You see, things change now within one week. Not just tools they use but words as well. It’s all code. Not that it matters — no one can understand them anyway. Even when they talk, I mean really talk by slightly opening their mouths, all the sounds they make are muffled and twisted, almost whispered out of their hairy faces.
Their rap is to me like goblin talk.
I feel for the guy. He is twenty now and though still on the hight of his powers, he is already gazing at the abyss. And in this case the abyss is me.
I could never find a believable explanation, why he hired me anyway. It must have something to do with his vision and denial, that he will grew old long before he will get the product to the market. All the analysis showed, it will take approximately ten years to reach high enough market penetration for it all to make sense. He’ll be 30 then. Scrapyard material. Mind blown.
He must have hired me to fuel his hopes. I was a fit 25 year old man back then acting as if I was still a teenager. My parents were getting by somehow so I had no family yet to take care of. I had enough time to study what kids are doing, to maintain my boyish looks, and to cultivate my creative mind. Once you have parents to take care of, it all goes to hell. Your hair turns gray and you have to shave your nasty old man’s beard, a clear sign you are not a member of the transitory juvenile elite anymore.
Your purpose is then reduced to teaching elderly how to use basic appliances. How to turn on the water, which way door handles move now, how to cook an instant meal and where to flush. Adult diapers change their interface at least five times a year. Imagine a forty year old man adapting that fast. Even women, generally much slower to age and more adaptable, can’t keep up with it anymore.
Our parents were the first generation in human history that had to take on educators role as kids on a massive scale. At the dawn on intelligent machines and at what we now call ‘a leap trough technology’, the vast majority had no clue of how to adapt and interact with this things.
Only kids caught on fast enough.
Our parents were kids then and it all came naturally to them. Manipulating objects on tv screen seemed to their parents like magic. They never could put in the amount of time needed to understand or work it. But they had to use it. They were forced to use machines at their work and later on everywhere, all the time. So they turned to their kids and thus the great reverse knowledge transfer began.
It used to be easy and straightforward before interaction became a commodity. You’ve learned from older people and once you have mastered the necessary skills and gathered enough experience, you started to teach younger people. I was like that trough all our history. Now it’s all in reverse. To be able to exist in the fast changing world we rely upon our children to perpetually train us in the protocols of daily interaction with the world. Without it we are out. Isolated. We don’t teach languages and math in schools anymore. All we now teach our kids are educators skills. The most essential for us all now, is to train our children to be good teachers to the old. We all sadly depend on it.
I’m getting fired. The chatter has subsided. It’s even quieter than on Christmas morning. I’ve been up all night silently tapping into all the conversations. The sentiment reached its boiling point around midnight and my account balance started to fall rapidly. It will hit zero any second now. Some say it feels like falling from the cloud and hitting earth. I’ll try to keep calm. Nobody does.
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