Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
—
Douglas Adams, “The Salmon of Doubt”
Douglas Adams, “The Salmon of Doubt”
Paul
on 28 Feb 11Wasn’t that originally in one of the H2G2 books?
Still pretty much spot on for a lot of people.
EH
on 28 Feb 11I’ve tried to live my life so far as a disproof of this.
Hibiscus
on 28 Feb 11Oh, yes! SO many examples of this:
- People of my generation (I’m 47) who decry text messaging abbreviations because they are destroying the communication abilities of our children. - People who decry Facebook and other social networking sites because they make people socially isolated “just staying home, staring at a screen”, and in the next sentence express a wish that we’d all go back to reading books (um, what?). - People who haughtily defend specific grammar, word usage or punctuation rules as “correct”, not recognizing that language constantly evolves. - One of my favorites, described in the Bill Bryson book, “A Walk in the Woods,” a movement to “preserve” the barren mountaintops along the Appalachian Trail from being encroached by wild blackbeeries, when the mountaintops were themselves carved out of the native landscape by early settlers.
Scott
on 28 Feb 11I always thought this of historic neighborhood preservation efforts. What makes a certain point-in-time the point that should be “preserved”? Where were the “preservation” voices when the first new roads were cut into an area, or the first new homes put up, or the first non-natural trees planted? The only thing that marks a point in time as worth “preserving” is seemingly that it’s the point-in-time which seems “natural” to the preservers.
GregT
on 28 Feb 11Yeah, right, surfing Facebook is basically the same as reading. I am guessing you are not a parent, or if you are, your kids will be in prison or on welfare, eventually.
Devan
on 01 Mar 11RIP Douglas Adams – my favourite author ever! I’ve used this exact phrase in quite a few presentations and talks that I have given…
Matt Edgar
on 01 Mar 11Love this idea. Adams uses the example of a chair as something that was once “technology” but is now, literally, just part of the furniture. In the same piece he made a more interesting point: that the concept of “interactive” media is an old one which we had lost and have now rediscovered: “Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.” http://wp.me/p1bV4-c7
JFR
on 01 Mar 11I loved Shelby’s because I could come in early, get my work done in two hours, then spend the rest of the day hittin hundreds of golf balls, hanging out with Michael Jordan and hone my shoplifting skills. Time of my life.
Hamid
on 02 Mar 11Yes it is, I’ve tried to disproof of this.
Frank
on 03 Mar 11Liked this article a lot. Really hit home for me. I run a business with my wife and I tend to want to charge more for our services. She doesn’t, because she thinks it’s better to go low to get your foot in the door. When the engagement is up and its time to renegotiate, the customers balk when we try to raise the price. I’ve noticed if you charge them approriately, you not only get the right price, but you get a customer you work extremely well with.
This discussion is closed.