When Bob Dylan wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” I’m pretty sure he meant for the better. As visionary as the singer was, he could not have foreseen the crazy cultural change that a 24×7 connected world would bring.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m no Luddite. I grew up in the high-tech industry. Tech is a big part of my life. But some things are better left unchanged. Here are 10 signs that you’re not keeping up with the trends – and maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
1. You still use grammar and spell checkers. You can tell “there” from “their,” “your” from “you’re,” “role from roll” and “to” from “too.” Also comments like “The most sucesful people on the world has fialed the most” make you want to poke your eyes out with a pen, if you could still find one. And yes, that was a real comment; I get them daily.
2. You wonder how every single one of the billion-plus people on Facebook could possibly have such happy lives, beautiful spouses, genius kids, amazing jobs and fun vacations. And married couples you know would kill each other if they could get away with it act like they’re madly in love online.
3. You’ve never texted at 65 mph, taken a selfie (clothed or not), flushed a toilet with your phone on speaker, tried to follow a recipe on a tiny screen while using a razor-sharp 10” chef’s knife, been thrown off a plane because you couldn’t stop playing TwoDots for takeoff, or even thought about trying Tinder.
4. You don’t think facts and opinions should be synonymous. You yearn for the good old days when scientists could distinguish legitimate research from pseudoscience and engaged in the scientific method instead of popular polls to determine whether the entire human race should abolish fossil fuels and gas-powered cars.
5. You don’t get how Facebook paid $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp, a 55-person company with no revenue; Yo – an app that just texts the word “Yo” – raised $1.5 million at a $10 million valuation; and a Kickstarter project to make potato salad raised $55,492 from 6,911 flaming morons.
6. You can’t understand how people with more expensive cars, newer generation smartphones, nicer TVs, and fancier clothes than you get entitlement subsidies from the government. And how does it make one bit of sense that the poor – including their kids, by the way – are so obese?
7. You think someone who calls himself a CEO should at least have a job. And you don’t believe that “entrepreneurship is a state of mind” that describes a “risk-taker, self-starter and visionary” who has never taken a risk, started a company, or had a single innovative idea in his life (apparently the case with most millennials).
8. You have no idea why everyone you know has a PC while every computer on TV is a Mac.
9. You don’t think it’s right that half of adults say they couldn’t last more than a day without their phone and millennials say their mobile phone is the most important thing in their daily lives – more important than their car and personal hygiene. Maybe that’s why they have trouble finding good jobs.
10. You think lists like this one are for idiots (or lazy writers with ADHD). Also you don’t believe we live in the golden age of journalism or that smartphones make us superhuman and unleash humanity’s creative potential, as some popular tech writers seem to think. And yes, they’re serious.
You just can’t make this stuff up, folks.
Image credit Ellen De Voss via Flickr
A version of this originally appeared on foxbusiness.com