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livSome of my friends have been talking about how our 14-year-old selves would think about 2014, and that's interesting enough I thought I'd put it in its own post rather than in the comments on a locked journal article.
I was 14 in 1993. I think the furthest ahead I could imagine "the future" was probably about 2010, maybe 2013 at at push. Everything in the mid 2010s, both in terms of how the world would be and my own personal life seemed just too distant to imagine. I sometimes tried to imagine what my 30th birthday would be like, but I don't think I even had a concept of looking back on that date from five years on.
Career-wise, at 14 I was still answering the question "what do you want to do when you grow up?" with "junior school teacher", but I don't think I'd have been surprised that I ended up as a biology lecturer in a university. I had already planned to go to Oxford and read biochemistry, and I was toying with the idea of getting a higher degree in the subject. I was a few years from discovering what has become my actual scientific passion, I might have said genetics rather than cell fate or cancer, but again that would only have come as a mild surprise. I would have imagined the details wrong, but yeah, having a little flat on campus and going in to work and giving lecturers and seminars or into the lab and doing science, that would make sense to me.
On the other hand, if you'd told me at 14 that I would be married by now I wouldn't have believed you at all. I was completely convinced that I was terminally unattractive and completely uninterested in any sort of romantic or sexual relationship. I also regarded marriage as a means of exchanging independence for security, primarily in order to bring up children, and I was completely (and correctly) convinced I never wanted children and had no particular desire for security but a passionate yearning for independence as that was the main thing missing from my generally happy but fairly regimented teenaged life.
I had no idea that being attracted, let alone attractive, to women was an option. I considered the idea I was asexual, though that wasn't really an identity category in those days, more a biological deficiency I suppose, because I was both a late bloomer sexually and also never was and never have been attracted to teenaged boys. I would have been pleasantly surprised at 14 to find I have so many good friends now, but honestly I'm a bit surprised even at 35 that so many wonderful people like me and want to be part of my life. But the idea of lovers, past and present, completely unthinkable. I think partly I had absorbed from my background some disapproval of sex outside marriage, but thought of giving up the possibility of sex as a very minor sacrifice or possibly even an advantage.
14-year-old me, who was just trying for the first time and not very successfully to grow my hair out (I was not allowed to try until I'd had my bat mitzvah), would have been absolutely delighted to know that I now have hair long enough to sit on. At 14 I was also just starting to have some input into choosing my own clothes and trying, again with limited success, to develop a personal style. I can see a path for how I dress now developed from how I was trying to dress then, probably the key insight I was lacking was that with my high-waisted figure, untucked shirts look a lot better than tucked in ones, even though everybody around me considered loose shirts to be non-smart. I wear somewhat less purple than I'd thought I might, but still quite a lot.
What about the broader world? I know it's obvious, but the biggest surprise to 14-year-old me would be the internet and the Moore's law expansion of computers. The only way I could explain my current reality to my kid-self would be by referring to the eponymous Guide in Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. I would have been absolutely bowled over to think that that the technology to make that possible would not only be invented in my lifetime, but would be available retail for no more than a few weeks' wages. I think I could have grasped some of the implications of having comprehensive, highly searchable reference libraries in your pocket, but I would have been completely fazed by the social implications. The fact you can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world at any time, in real time or asynchronously, in text, voice or video, the fact that anyone who has anything to say can publish and broadcast their ideas, and all this is just a part of the infrastructure that you pay a monthly subscription for like you do for a phoneline with no further costs beyond that, would have been incomprehensible to me.
Lots of people have talked about the difference the internet makes to being able to research stuff about sexuality, beyond the control of parents and teachers. I find it hard to imagine how my life might have gone if I'd caught some clue about Queer stuff before I was 20. My feeling is that my biggest problem as a teenager was not that I didn't have access to the internet, it's more that the information simply didn't exist. Almost nobody was talking non-judgementally and informatively about sexual and gender diversity. I imagine myself trying to explain to my 14-year-old self, look, kid, you're not asexual, you're bi, and you just happen to have a very strong preference for fully mature adults. But teenager!Liv had no possible context for this information.
I think the one thing my 14-year-old self would find most shocking, most alien about 2014, is that LGBT people (she didn't even know any other sexual and gender identities existed) would have legally enshrined equality. There would be actual laws prohibiting companies and organizations from discriminating against people attracted to others of the same sex. The accompanying social change is almost more surprising than the legislation that's resulted; the idea that most people would be entirely open about non-straight sexualities and relationships, the idea that it would be considered unacceptable to be homophobic just like it's bad to be racist, just mind-blowing. (I'm not saying homophobia has been eliminated, any more than racism has, just that it's generally considered to be a bad thing.)
Same sex romances being completely run of the mill in soap operas and TV shows, and the plot's not some dark thing about navigating homophobia, it's just the usual relationship drama, out trans celebrities and journalists, obvious, not just sub-textual, Queer content in pop-songs... Male-male or female-female couples getting married, the whole deal, putting on fancy clothes, announcing their weddings in the newspaper, inviting their work colleagues and schoolfriends and random cousins and in-laws, not just a secret group of close friends who are in the know and have carefully been sounded out for whether they're "tolerant", that concept is almost more surprising to my teenage self than the fact that those marriages are also legally recognized.
In many ways the world has turned out far better than I could have imagined at 14. Yes, we're still fighting in Iraq and there is still violence in the Middle East, but I don't think even as an idealistic 14-year-old I really thought that would be sorted out in twenty years. I don't think I would be that surprised by 9/11, I grew up in England not the US and I expect terrorism in one form or another. Indeed, I would have been and was, a few years later, pretty surprised by the amount of progress that was made in Ireland culminating in the Good Friday Agreement. I went and checked the dates and yes, by the time I was 14 I knew communism was over and boundaries were going to be re-drawn all over Eastern Europe, so I would be sad but not surprised to hear about ongoing conflicts. The Rwandan genocide was only a few months away, and yes, I was shocked by that. And environmental catastrophe seems more imminent than it did when I was a kid, though we were already starting to talk about green issues and global warming. Still, socially and technologically, 2014 looks in many ways more futuristic than I would have predicted, even if I had tried to imagine that far into the future.
So, what do you think, what would your 14-year-old self have made of 2014?
I was 14 in 1993. I think the furthest ahead I could imagine "the future" was probably about 2010, maybe 2013 at at push. Everything in the mid 2010s, both in terms of how the world would be and my own personal life seemed just too distant to imagine. I sometimes tried to imagine what my 30th birthday would be like, but I don't think I even had a concept of looking back on that date from five years on.
Career-wise, at 14 I was still answering the question "what do you want to do when you grow up?" with "junior school teacher", but I don't think I'd have been surprised that I ended up as a biology lecturer in a university. I had already planned to go to Oxford and read biochemistry, and I was toying with the idea of getting a higher degree in the subject. I was a few years from discovering what has become my actual scientific passion, I might have said genetics rather than cell fate or cancer, but again that would only have come as a mild surprise. I would have imagined the details wrong, but yeah, having a little flat on campus and going in to work and giving lecturers and seminars or into the lab and doing science, that would make sense to me.
On the other hand, if you'd told me at 14 that I would be married by now I wouldn't have believed you at all. I was completely convinced that I was terminally unattractive and completely uninterested in any sort of romantic or sexual relationship. I also regarded marriage as a means of exchanging independence for security, primarily in order to bring up children, and I was completely (and correctly) convinced I never wanted children and had no particular desire for security but a passionate yearning for independence as that was the main thing missing from my generally happy but fairly regimented teenaged life.
I had no idea that being attracted, let alone attractive, to women was an option. I considered the idea I was asexual, though that wasn't really an identity category in those days, more a biological deficiency I suppose, because I was both a late bloomer sexually and also never was and never have been attracted to teenaged boys. I would have been pleasantly surprised at 14 to find I have so many good friends now, but honestly I'm a bit surprised even at 35 that so many wonderful people like me and want to be part of my life. But the idea of lovers, past and present, completely unthinkable. I think partly I had absorbed from my background some disapproval of sex outside marriage, but thought of giving up the possibility of sex as a very minor sacrifice or possibly even an advantage.
14-year-old me, who was just trying for the first time and not very successfully to grow my hair out (I was not allowed to try until I'd had my bat mitzvah), would have been absolutely delighted to know that I now have hair long enough to sit on. At 14 I was also just starting to have some input into choosing my own clothes and trying, again with limited success, to develop a personal style. I can see a path for how I dress now developed from how I was trying to dress then, probably the key insight I was lacking was that with my high-waisted figure, untucked shirts look a lot better than tucked in ones, even though everybody around me considered loose shirts to be non-smart. I wear somewhat less purple than I'd thought I might, but still quite a lot.
What about the broader world? I know it's obvious, but the biggest surprise to 14-year-old me would be the internet and the Moore's law expansion of computers. The only way I could explain my current reality to my kid-self would be by referring to the eponymous Guide in Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. I would have been absolutely bowled over to think that that the technology to make that possible would not only be invented in my lifetime, but would be available retail for no more than a few weeks' wages. I think I could have grasped some of the implications of having comprehensive, highly searchable reference libraries in your pocket, but I would have been completely fazed by the social implications. The fact you can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world at any time, in real time or asynchronously, in text, voice or video, the fact that anyone who has anything to say can publish and broadcast their ideas, and all this is just a part of the infrastructure that you pay a monthly subscription for like you do for a phoneline with no further costs beyond that, would have been incomprehensible to me.
Lots of people have talked about the difference the internet makes to being able to research stuff about sexuality, beyond the control of parents and teachers. I find it hard to imagine how my life might have gone if I'd caught some clue about Queer stuff before I was 20. My feeling is that my biggest problem as a teenager was not that I didn't have access to the internet, it's more that the information simply didn't exist. Almost nobody was talking non-judgementally and informatively about sexual and gender diversity. I imagine myself trying to explain to my 14-year-old self, look, kid, you're not asexual, you're bi, and you just happen to have a very strong preference for fully mature adults. But teenager!Liv had no possible context for this information.
I think the one thing my 14-year-old self would find most shocking, most alien about 2014, is that LGBT people (she didn't even know any other sexual and gender identities existed) would have legally enshrined equality. There would be actual laws prohibiting companies and organizations from discriminating against people attracted to others of the same sex. The accompanying social change is almost more surprising than the legislation that's resulted; the idea that most people would be entirely open about non-straight sexualities and relationships, the idea that it would be considered unacceptable to be homophobic just like it's bad to be racist, just mind-blowing. (I'm not saying homophobia has been eliminated, any more than racism has, just that it's generally considered to be a bad thing.)
Same sex romances being completely run of the mill in soap operas and TV shows, and the plot's not some dark thing about navigating homophobia, it's just the usual relationship drama, out trans celebrities and journalists, obvious, not just sub-textual, Queer content in pop-songs... Male-male or female-female couples getting married, the whole deal, putting on fancy clothes, announcing their weddings in the newspaper, inviting their work colleagues and schoolfriends and random cousins and in-laws, not just a secret group of close friends who are in the know and have carefully been sounded out for whether they're "tolerant", that concept is almost more surprising to my teenage self than the fact that those marriages are also legally recognized.
In many ways the world has turned out far better than I could have imagined at 14. Yes, we're still fighting in Iraq and there is still violence in the Middle East, but I don't think even as an idealistic 14-year-old I really thought that would be sorted out in twenty years. I don't think I would be that surprised by 9/11, I grew up in England not the US and I expect terrorism in one form or another. Indeed, I would have been and was, a few years later, pretty surprised by the amount of progress that was made in Ireland culminating in the Good Friday Agreement. I went and checked the dates and yes, by the time I was 14 I knew communism was over and boundaries were going to be re-drawn all over Eastern Europe, so I would be sad but not surprised to hear about ongoing conflicts. The Rwandan genocide was only a few months away, and yes, I was shocked by that. And environmental catastrophe seems more imminent than it did when I was a kid, though we were already starting to talk about green issues and global warming. Still, socially and technologically, 2014 looks in many ways more futuristic than I would have predicted, even if I had tried to imagine that far into the future.
So, what do you think, what would your 14-year-old self have made of 2014?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 02:00 pm (UTC)So 14 y-old me would probably be raging jealous of the kids these days, with their tumblrs and their geek communities, but then, if the internet use rules in my house were different, and if something had come along to give me a push (in the end it was a blurb in a Cecilia Dart-Thornton book for her fansite - I'd already checked out Tamora Pierce's Sheroes.com and not clicked there) I could've discovered all kinds of things, and people (including my now best friend, if i'd gone to harry potter sites instead of LOTR!) many years earlier.
14 y-old me's eyes would bug out to discover how many queer people there are in the world, including me. But the fact that queer people exist was presumably a readily available fact (as opposed to a hypothetical and cause for theological debate, in which I am proud to say I took the side of justice, on the grounds that things opposed by my school were probably good things) to kids in the early 2000s, either those who lived in more cosmopolitan surrounds or who went out of their way to find out.
Aside from the question of sexuality & relationship styles (oh, and athiesm, that would be a shock), though, 14 y-old me would, if given a precis of my life now, feel smugly validated. And probably high-five me. And want to talk about Arthurian lit. As I said to my class, the first time I taught an Arthur specific course: I have achieved the apogee of my teenage ambitions. I have found a place for teaching without dealing with highschoolers. I get paid to read and talk about literature. People tend to like this about me instead of picking on me for it. The strategy of picking prestigous but not inachievable educational goals and going after them like a terrier after a rabbit has been repeatedly successful. If 14-year old me were shocked about this, it wouldn't be about what's become of *me* so much as that it turns out to actually be true that people can do things like major in medieval studies, or move to europe to do more medieval studies.
And 14-year old me would probably be quite relieved to hear I'm not married and don't plan to be, even if the alternatives chosen would boggle her. (On the grounds that my schoolteachers would disapprove, she'd probably gamely congratuate me, despite total incomprehension.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 02:03 pm (UTC)But then *I* still find that surprising.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 02:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 04:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 02:26 pm (UTC)I like that your younger self would feel smug about you! Yay for finding a career talking about literature and Arthuriana. I was about the same with doggedly pursuing educational goals in order to be able to get a career studying and teaching the material I was fascinated by, though unlike you I had a pretty good idea that academics exist, they make up a lot of my parents' social circle.
I maybe should have said something about how my religious position both would and wouldn't have surprised my 14-year-old self. But yes, queer stuff as hypothetical theological debate, wow, it was only a few years later that my community convened an emergency meeting to debate same-sex marriage, and I wasn't quite ready to articulate to myself that it was directly applicable to me but I somehow sensed that it was really important for the pro-gay arguments to prevail. I remember my parents finding it really difficult but very much wanting to do the right thing, and none of us really having any kind of gay rights framework to work in or against.
I was very much into pleasing, not rebelling against, authorities at that age. I think my teachers would be proud of me for making a career in academia, but I feel a bit squirmy to think that some of them might disapprove of my dating women. I'm going to pretend to myself that they've all moved with the times since I left school.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 02:37 pm (UTC)For all that, I thought of myself - still do think of myself - as boring, conformist, rule-abiding. The fact that in the adult world, the capacity to go "mmmm... marriage-like-pair bonding... nah" and work out an alternative is much more non-conformist than whether or not you always do your homework, or enthusiastically engage in class. Wow.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 02:41 pm (UTC)Fortunately I'd discovered that the authorities I liked were not as keen on bisexuals as on dinosaurs BEFORE I came out.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 05:04 pm (UTC)Being conformist or not is a strange one. I think being very nearly the only Jewish kid in my school, and being fat and bad at clothes, meant that I really couldn't "fit in" no matter how law-abiding I was. I totally see what you mean about your relationship structures making you automatically non-conformist even if that's not really your personality. That's why I still can't quite get my head round how much getting married has caused me to pass, I am much more used to being weird no matter how hard I try.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 02:44 pm (UTC)I had absolutely no idea that the gay ordination notion might apply to me, except in a 'could be leading my congregation' way, but my god, I was not going to stand for exclusionary logic. I got completely stumped, though, by my mother's assertion that she supported Resolution 84 (qualified approval) but would not want a gay man as minister, because that's *creepy*. I always had the impression she thought gay men were particularly a threat to women and girls, which makes no sense at all. The concept of lesbians was not raised. I'm pretty sure mum still doesn't quite believe that two women would voluntarily have *sex*.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 05:16 pm (UTC)My particular denomination was a bit oddball in that we've had openly gay and lesbian ministers basically forever, I think we're celebrating a several decade anniversary this year, but we took a really long time to accept same-sex marriage. I think this is a large part of why I grew up thinking gayness was a terrible affliction, it was clear to me that it's wrong to be mean to people because of their orientation, since that would have entailed being mean to rabbis I looked up to. But I didn't imagine it could ever be a positive thing or have any connection with finding relationships that would make you happy.
My parents I think just had no exposure to anything non-heterosexual until we were teenagers (the 60s kind of passed them by...) So they did struggle when their paradigm got exploded, but they were logical and compassionate and sensibly figured out that it's best to be supportive and friendly to LGBT people, whether or not that category includes their own children.
Non-heterosexual
Date: 2014-07-24 10:44 pm (UTC)I hope my acceptance of non-heterosexual relationships is supportive and not just a passive tolerance. At the same time, I still do a slight double-take at the physical side of male homosexuality but not female. Otherwise, my only reaction to gender identity issues is a very deep sympathy if (while) they cause problems.
Southernwood
Re: Non-heterosexual
Date: 2014-07-28 08:29 pm (UTC)Slight snort :) This is not uncommon, and amongst the things that amuses me is that most anal intercourse - which is what is usually meant by this - involves a woman.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-29 10:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 04:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 05:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 05:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 06:31 pm (UTC)Literally uninhabitable is probably an exaggeration, but I've seen models (can't remember the details, but they came from senior people in international health planning, not random cranks) which suggest that the human population will fall by 90% by 2100. That's probably about as bad as was feared from mutually assured destruction during the Cold War. I've seen convincing claims that it'll take centuries for massive sea-level rises to completely change the landscape, I've also seen convincing claims that the secondary effects of small temperature rises will become unmanageable on a scale of decades. These seem to be addressing different questions about just how bad climate change is going to be, but I'm more scared of the second.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 05:54 pm (UTC)There are times when I wonder whether the Cold War might not yet turn out to have been better for our long-term viability as a species than the scale of instability we have had since, which tends to mean my blood sugar is running low.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 06:38 pm (UTC)In hindsight, no, the Cold War didn't do a lot of harm! But from what I've read we came reeeeeeally close to all-out nuclear war. Ukraine is pretty scary, Syria is pretty scary, the US is making things worse by starting numerous land-wars in Asia and using drones and generally fomenting anti-Western sentiment. But worse for viability than, say, the Cuban missile crisis? I'm not completely resistant to that view, but I would need some convincing.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-23 10:02 pm (UTC)[1] which AIUI is still suffering casualties as a result of UXO
Far more so than the 2000s, at any rate, though how this decade compares I'm not so sure, it's late and none of the convenient war-deaths-per-year graphs I can easily find go up to this year.
Compared to an all-out nuclear war with the arsenals of (say) the 1960s onwards this is all small beer of course. I'm not convinced that's the only route to not having the CW though.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-24 08:03 am (UTC)I promise, this was going to be a short co-sign type of comment, but then I got into it.
Date: 2014-07-24 01:11 am (UTC)I turned eight in '89 and I learned about the wall for the first time as it was falling, as we didn't talk much about other countries in school before that year. My childhood idol/hero was Samantha Smith--though my parents shielded me from the details of her early death and focused on her travels to the USSR. When I was about twelve, my younger sister actually got to travel to post-Soviet Russia for a couple of weeks, and we later hosted the young Russian girl she'd stayed with, in an international exchange. So I never had an understanding of the Cold War as anything other than an archaic thing on its way out. Now in fact, I was born into an era of heightened paranoia and nuclear standoff in the early Eighties. But when I was conscious, and able to retain memory, everything looked like it was on the way up.
In the US the 90s were a time of economic prosperity and stability that has since gone extinct--people are now too entrenched in a fear-based politics for that to ever happen again. And yeah, global capitalism is kind of wretched if you're living outside what I learned to call the "First World" back then, but as a teenager in what was then considered the lone remaining superpower, I had it pretty good. When I went to look at colleges and make a decision about where to do undergrad (as most people do in the US I chose the school long before I decided on my course of study there), all I heard about was how people were graduating into a world of competing job offers. And in my case, the myth of meritocracy was prominently at work--this idea that I could so totally go from subsidized housing for the poor to an Ivy League school, that I could do anything or be anything I wanted. There was a tangible sense that the world was mine for the taking.
Then I went to college and by the time I graduated there had been a terrorist attack and we were going to war in an extended fashion for the first time in my life. (Gulf War I was a blip on my radar in Grade Four, but no one had the sense that that war was going to change American culture--it was promoted to children, certainly, as a humanitarian intervention.) The truth is, of course, that American military power and economic forces were at work in the world throughout my life, often in ways that had negative consequences for people in other countries, but I was the embodiment of what those efforts were designed to protect. Then I woke up one day in September as a college student in NYC, and I went to a French exam and heard all these sirens zooming down Broadway for hours and hours and hours... I've never again been as scared as I was then.
You know, it's funny, but I do think that in the end, I get more optimism than cynicism from my experiences in 2001. I thought of myself as a peaceful person before then, but I reacted strongly against the military actions of the next decade from the very beginning, and became much more emphatically anti-war. I don't know how anyone could experience the NYC of September 12 and not be optimistic about the future. And yet I know that tons of people became more security-focused, scared, went and enlisted--people had all sorts of reactions, as they are wont to do. Still, I just kind of can't help but feel like there's hope, and that's a big part of how I view both the world and my own individual life. And I feel like the inevitability of my belief is largely because of that tiny window, when you could, if you were in the right situation, truly be born into a world that was designed to enable you.
(NB: I'm white, cis, have had uncommon access to education my whole life, and experienced more class mobility than many. I don't discount any of those advantages here.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-24 01:39 pm (UTC)I do find it quite scary just how fast the US has fallen from being the predominant superpower in the 80s to not even being able to provide water or disaster relief to its major cities. I think even as quite a young child I knew that Britain's heyday was long in the past, and yes, in some ways things are worse economically now than in the boom times of the 80s, but it's nothing like as dramatic. It must have been weird to live through that, especially being exactly the age to become politically aware in the tail end of the prosperity era. Thank you for talking about it.
I deliberately wanted to talk about personal perspectives on how the world has changed, because I most certainly don't feel knowledgeable enough to offer a global perspective. Yes, the future is unevenly distributed, perhaps even more now than when we were kids, but it's certainly worth acknowledging that the 90s wasn't a magical time of peace and prosperity for everybody.
Yes, that was exactly the attitude I grew up with, I so often heard, you can have anything you want in life as long as you're prepared to work for it. Which is partly coming from a background of poor people and immigrants who made good a couple of generations back (actually poor, not just a bit less well off than our generation). The circumstances in which my grandparents worked hard and saved up so that their kids could have a nice middle-class childhood and their grandkids were actually relatively rich didn't apply to everybody even in the immediate post-war years, and most of those circumstances (strong welfare state, labour shortage etc) aren't really in place at all any more. But I definitely had the belief that I could do anything, and I still have that confidence in some ways even though I know intellectually that the job market isn't what it was.
It's really fascinating to hear your 2001 story, thank you for talking about that. We've had a very, very different history of terrorist attacks including within the English borders; I've never been in a position of not realizing that people might try to kill random English people because of the legacy of English colonialism, and I've also never been in a position of being physically close to a huge event with that scale of casualties.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-24 09:58 am (UTC)At that age I was very into fanfic, which introduced me to LGBT issues in a roundabout sort of a way. I'm still sorta surprised that "mainstream" society has got it's head around these things at least a bit, and that we can now have same sex weddings.
By 14 I'd made some geeky friends, and had the notion that "my people" were out there... I don't think I'd be so surprised to learn that once I was free of parental restrictions on my social life that I found nice people to be friends with. I think I might have been surprised to know that I'd find some nice men to be in relationships with.
I think I'd be disappointed that I turned out too stupid to be a physics researcher, but not amazed that IT was a good back-up career option. Much less surprised than my parents that a Cambridge degree is not a ticket to untold riches.
The world has been going to hell in a handbasket for as long as I remember, I don't think any of the current news is something I would have specifically predicted at 14; but I think it would surprise.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-26 03:58 am (UTC)(As for what I thought of it, well, perhaps the less said the better. I got to spend my childhood wrestling with a fairly severe form of what would eventually come to be known as Asperger's.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-26 08:01 am (UTC)Once I had wrapped my head around the idea that same-sex relationships were a thing which could happen to me, I assumed that same-sex marriage would be a thing. It was only when I reflected on it a little more in-depth some years later that I fully realized that it was not actually legal.
I had no clear career plan, but I would have been pleased that my job involves solving interesting problems and spending time on the computer. I would have been pleased as punch that it involved running an office, and having fellow Star Trek fans around. I would have fainted from glee at learning that I would get to meet real Star Trek actors in 2014. (I nearly fainted from glee in 2014, so that hasn't changed much.)
I would have been angrily envious of modern ease of communication. I'd already basically lost my best friend from when she moved away -- twice (same friend) -- and I would have given nearly anything to be able to send letters as fast as I could type them, talk on the phone nearly as long as I wanted for an affordable price, and talk on the phone from nearly anywhere.
I would have been surprised at my actual skill with computer administration and troubleshooting. Mostly I viewed them as convenient tools to produce writing and art, and the idea that I could trade my easy way with setting them up and fiddling with the settings into an actual thing that people paid me for would have been startling. Despite being raised by a programmer.
I would have been surprised that I was not married. I discovered a propensity for pair-bonding early, and expected that upon finding a suitable partner, I would tie the knot post-college.
I would have been very surprised that I did not finish college. It was expected of me. I had not yet discovered that there were many more things I liked better than school, although I still love learning. My dislike for schoolwork is no surprise.
I would have been surprised and delighted that I learned to fluently sit down and pour out nonfictional reflective words on arbitrary topics.
No one promised me a rose garden, but they did promise me a moon colony. The wonder and glee of watching a live video link, or instant replay video recording on a portable wonder box that barely weighs anything at all, of an astronaut singing from a space station, and instant communication on a widely-adopted global communications platform where nearly anyone can talk to nearly anyone else, and there's the chance to be heard and responded to -- would that have made up for the lack of moon colonies? I certainly couldn't have imagined it. The regrettable telepathy which was a plot point in the novel I was working on -- text messages can nearly fully replace that.
I was remarkably politically unaware, so the realities of life outside my little bubble all came as surprises when I encountered them. I had heard about many things, but they didn't really dent my reality.
But communication. The ease and global adoption of communication is really the big thing. It was so amazing that my father had friends in Russia, and the grad students he adopted had come from China. But voice was so expensive, letters were so slow, and telegrams were dodgy and very short. And now there is Twitter and astronauts tweeting FROM SPACE.
FROM SPACE.
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Date: 2014-07-28 04:38 am (UTC)Very interesting discussion topic, though!
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Date: 2014-07-28 08:25 pm (UTC)The effects of Moore's law continue to amaze and delight. I am still in awe at the power of my four year old smartphone. In 1976, microcomputers were new, but I wanted one. Knowing how many I would have, that I would actually build (more than) one, and how they would change, would have been nice.
"You'll still have the copy of the Terrible Swift Sword board wargame in 2014, although you won't have played it in a while."