The Best of Times

If you look in Google Images for "Best of Times," you get some strange images.  The one at the left might have been the strangest.

I sometimes read posts about polls in which people say they think that things will be worse for the children that it was for them.  And I find those sentiments strange, because I have considered many times over the years the incredible impact technology has had just in my lifetime, and I can only think that my children will have more than I could have ever had, and their children will have more, and so on.

There are so many examples I could give, but the one that somehow always strikes me is kind of a frivolous one:  the movie business.  I suppose the thing that fascinates me about movies is that a whole industry, symbolized by Blockbuster stores, has been built up from nothing and then wiped in my lifetime.  When I was young, you watched movies either in a movie theater or when they came on TV, with commercials, and you had to watch as they were broadcast, no recording.  And movies did not come on very often, because we only had a few channels.

The first big breakthrough I remember was the VCR.  Now you could rent a movie or buy it and watch whenever you wanted.  DVDs were just a better version of the video tape, but the DVR, combined with dozens of channels, made it possible to get free shows from all over cable.  Now even DVDs from Netflix are becoming obsolete; you just get a digital download of anything you want off of cable or Netflix.  My kids will never know a world in which you can't watch movies whenever you want to.

Want a more practical example?  OK, cars.  When I was young, cars had seat belts, for the driver anyway, and the front seat passenger also, I think.  They didn't always have belts for the back seats.  And these were lap belts only, no shoulder belts.  Forget about air bags, and cars weren't built to save your life in a crash.  It used to be that you hoped to get maybe 100,000 miles out of a car; now it's more like 200,000.  And when I was younger, when you started a car, you turned the key and the engine cranked and cranked, maybe you had to give it a little gas, and you hoped it caught before it flooded.  Somehow they solved that problem; cars just start now.  And those cars drained a lot of gas.  Now engines are more efficient, and electric cars may take over the world during my boys' lifetimes.  We didn't even have rear window defoggers.  Cars have gotten better.

Apply that kind of change across dozens of industries, and life has just gotten better and easier and richer over the years.  Ebooks, iPhones, iTunes, the Internet, microwaves, flat-screen TVs, GPSs, ATMs, so much more.  Right now is the best it has ever been.  Five years from now will be better.