Tiny Stairs
There was a time when comfort and convenience meant that people wouldn’t have to interact with one another and the brick and mortar stores would be supplanted by recyclable cardboard that no city would actually recycle and no country would actually buy.
This next generation won’t understand. Any paradigm shift only takes one generation for a kid to make you feel as old as your parents. “I used to have to pick up my toys and put them in the toy box myself,” I once said to an eight year old. I was 31, but the look that entitled generation gamma brat gave me made me feel like an 80-something millennial.
The kid was my nephew, and he was walking out of his bedroom as all of his toys used the tiny staircase to the toy box to put themselves away. I watched in disbelief. I’ll never get used to this, I thought, as the steps retracted back into themselves. The world had changed without me noticing. I guess my generation was too busy bitching about how earlier generations set us up to fail, and how the AI revolution made us lazier, that we didn’t even notice the increase in object mobility device installations (OMDI’s or “Ahm-dees” as Gen-gamma calls it).
In my day, the only ahmdees we had were for aging ESA dogs to reach their guardian’s bed. Or their “owner’s” bed, as my great-grandma used to say. Now, little stairs are as ubiquitous as pomegranates in Israelistine.
