Old guys like me say things like, “Why don’t kids play outside anymore?” Or, the even more dubious, “When I was a kid, I could play with a Hot Wheels car all afternoon.”
And generations before us have said the same things since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Replace “play outside” or “Hot Wheels car” with whatever activity or toy/mechanism/object lines up with that generation. My kids will say the same thing. Their kids will also.
Let’s face it: Have you seen an iPad? If you were six and someone plopped a pile of rocks and sticks in front of you and an iPad next to them, what would you choose? What does a pile of rocks and sticks have compared to an iPad? Nothing, that’s what.
We’ve built a callous up against wonder through technology. What once was magic and sci-fi is now commonplace.
There’s nothing wrong with the younger generation. Each generation finds its own magic in the world, albeit through different lenses. The core of human curiosity and playfulness remains; it simply evolves with the tools and times.
We just have different thicknesses to our callouses.
