Earlier today I had a rather sad epiphany. I was doing household chores and while getting all the washing ready for the laundry, I diligently went through the pockets of all the garments and well, it just isn't as fun now as it was in the good old days.
I can remember exultant cries of jubilation when my fingers touched paper. Not any sort of paper...the money kind of paper. It has it's very own texture and it's one that can't be mistaken for another. My fingertips would do a happy little dance as soon as I fumbled amongst the various other odds and ends but came across treasure. I used to call it "the laundry lady's pay day" and I'd tax those who it belonged to because well, they should know better. Most of the time though, it was my own money that simply got forgotten in pockets along the way and would patiently sit there waiting for laundry day.
These days? Well, it's kind of boring and rather flat to be honest. If I had kids I would make an effort to draw cash and whenever one of them did the washing, I'd sneak in some pocket money just for funzies, but these things aren't meant to pass down it seems.
We're heading towards a cashless society. A decade ago I still paid for most of my groceries in cash and card transactions were kept for mostly the bigger ticket items. Now days, you're lucky if you can amass enough cash to buy a month's groceries, it's just not used that much. I find it sad because cash is in it's own way part of the heritage of our lands, of our time. Whenever notes would change over to new ones, it was an exciting thing and the old notes would be hoarded by those thinking perhaps they would become collector's items. Now? They're simply forgotten like so much of our history - left to the dust.
It's things like this that I will miss because it's all well and good to think it doesn't have too much of an impact, but a lot of the maths that I learned as a kid was based on buying sweets from the local shop on the corner and knowing how much they were, how many coins I had and how much I expected to get in change. These days are kids getting that experience? Are they seeing money for the lower denominations being copper and the higher denominations being a metal of more value? How much is being lost in translation to the digital dollar?
It's very much like the digital age that has all but made the postage stamp become obsolete. Need to send a letter? Send an e-mail. Want to send a postcard? Send an e-card. But is it the same?
There's nothing quite like licking a postage stamp, putting it onto a handwritten something or other and sticking it through that dimensional portal in the postbox and waiting 3 weeks for the person on the other side to receive it.
Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, but I just feel like life is becoming sanitized of all these cool little nuances that I used to enjoy and being replaced with a very bland computer version of real life.
Are kids ever going to play marbles with their friends or are they too busy posting selfies to placate their dopamine addiction for the day in the form of like collecting?
Perhaps I'm just trying to hang onto nostalgia of yesteryear, but I'm telling you now, I'm going to make sure that my niece gets to experience finding a $5 note while lint diving for treasure and the rapturous delight of stamp licking and curling up your lip at the taste of the sticky sweetsour gum while whisking off your postcard to a distant relative. Because these things are fun and this new era just isn't.
Let's bring the fun back. What do you guys think? Feel free to tell me in the comments.
The image was taken by me
