Enjoy

While you can

I was emailing with my pal Steve and the subject of radios came up. It struck me only then that it’d been a long time since I’d even encountered a radio — in the sense of the physical object whose only purpose was to receive and then amplify radio transmissions so you could listen to them. Sure you can listen to radio over the Internet, as my wife does endlessly with BBC Radio 4, and podcasts are kinda like “radio”, though again they’re delivered wholly over the web.

But radios, per se… they’re probably dead now, right?

I remember getting my first. It was around a birthday and my father took me down to the high street of the town we were living in at the time and we went to the store that specialized in such things (those stores are dead now too) and bought a pretty large thing that not only received radio, but had a cassette-playing function. Witchcraft. Culture in a box.

It was my treasured companion for the rest of my teenage years. It’s how I learned about new songs, diligently listening to the Top 10 countdown of singles every day while I did my homework — judging the moment to press the Record button (something as robustly physical as using an old manual typewriter) to get my own copy of some new tune, however marred it might be by the DJ talking over the beginning and the end. Unless or until you could afford to buy the single or album that’s the only way you were only ever going to hear music — and certainly the only route to getting your own copy that you could play whenever you wanted. It was a big deal.

That’s gone now. People have phones which deliver tens of millions of songs to them simply by asking, arranged into playlists, delivered randomly, or selected for their inferred tastes by an algorithm somewhere. And sure, that’s a lot more convenient (though I have talked elsewhere here about the benefits of the old ways), and I’m not denying it. This is not some “get off my tech lawn” (semi)old guy rant, but more an acknowledgement, and respectful marking of times past.

I come here not to praise radio, but to bury it. That miraculous invention which once changed everybody’s lives, had families crowding around a set the size of a fridge in order to keep abreast of some foreign war or to listen to the warbling of four cowpokes and a guitar, something that once seemed cultural bedrock… is done.

What did it have, about a hundred years? Over the tens of thousands of years we’ve been human, that’s barely a blink. Books have had far longer but it may be that their window — at least as physical objects — is closing too. They seem to be fighting obsolescence a good deal harder than many feared, thankfully, but I wonder if that’s because, for now, there still exist houses with books in them. There’s a crap-ton in ours, for example, as you might expect — probably a hundred and fifty in the kitchen alone. My son has therefore grown up with a constant background reminder that such things exist and that there are people who use and respect them. His children likely won’t — and I suspect that’s the point at which the book-as-object will fall out of history.

Is that the end of the world? I guess not. Things have their span and that span is fleeting. The important thing is to notice it.

The best piece of advice I was given about getting married was to make sure to take a couple of moments during the day during which to stop moving and talking, and instead be purely conscious of being there, then. Those are now the moments I remember in a day that seemed to pass in an instant. Similarly I think the only good piece of advice I’ve ever given to people when it comes to parenting is to try to relish each stage, however unbelievably annoying it may be at times… because it’ll be over before you know it and it ain’t ever coming back. What might feel like an onerous duty today will feel very different when your kid doesn’t want it from you any more.

It’s true of the world too. There’s a lovely quote in Amy Krause Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (which I highly recommend), making a similar point:

All things will pass. Having a phone you can lose, or which runs out of battery — instead of it being an ever-present implant in your brain. Having to schlep over the hill to work and deal with co-workers — rather than sitting there at home doing it remotely and never seeing or meeting anybody new. Having to wait in line for coffee or a restaurant table, winding up chatting with other people or the staff or merely standing there in the crisp morning air or lamp-lit twilight and gazing peaceably around, truly inhabiting the space and the moment because you have nothing else to do — rather than everything being available the second you arrive because your (paid by subscription) implant predicted you’d want a coffee and pre-ordered at the store, where an AI triaged all such incoming orders based on previous behavior patterns and made sure everybody’s was ready the moment they walked in the door. Television shows which are bad because untalented humans wrote them — rather than blandly fine because they were churned out by software. Withstanding songs you don’t like (but might have come to, in time) — instead of artificial intelligence and the mechanisms of online commerce so over-curating your experience that you’re only ever confronted with things you’re pre-destined to like, however fucking boring that becomes.

All these things and more will pass, and in some or even many cases it may be for the best. But they’ll still be gone. So it’s worth trying to enjoy them while they’re not.

And that counts a hundred-fold for the people in your lives.