Our Generational Amnesia :Delights of the Ordinary No. 49 (S2)
Sometimes it is a world of deep thoughts and charming forgetfulness.
Delights of the Ordinary is for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone. This newsletter intersects culture, art, science, and philosophy with our practical 9-5 job space.
“ But they don’t know what it is like. How the constant trade winds from the northeast make summer cool. How happy life is here, where we can enjoy lounging around, reading a book in the shade of trees or if the notion strikes us, go down, just are we are, for a dip in the inlet.”
- Haruki Murakami
Even if nobody has briefed you about how excessively our hearts and minds can hold the intangible, the straightforward truth is that we all have drastically vaster corridors of warm sunny bents and meadowy expanses inside us. It is just that in time we `forget` to catch the luminance of the things slumbering inside us.
Forgetfulness is an epidemic in our generation!
We forget to put sugar in our morning coffee, salt in our ‘daal,’ forget to return an important call or miss hitting the send button for that critical mail to our bosses. We forget to look up to the wobbly, bouncy spectacular waves of clouds or touch the air that we can’t see. We forget to smile at each other or chuckle non-sensically inventing some stupid games to kill our boredom.
We are a forgetful generation!
And so with Delights of the Ordinaries and the Little Letter series, there is, in some manner, an effort to tackle the forgetfulness of missing the simple ordinary touches. Somewhere with these letters to you, it is like saying let us write letters like our parents did or we did when our teenage love was innocent. Sending love letters or letters of apology!
Even when wired phones were a thing and Twitter cacophony was not a part of our lives we did short conversations o’er the phone and wrote long poetic sentences in our letters. Posting letters to our best friend, who went to another city to study, describing how our city is still the same and roads still run parallel the way they used to!
This sort of uncomplicated grade of ordinary living where we do not forget to touch into our old and catching the new is phenomenolly good, like the sprinkle of good vibes!
So the ideal would be to jump out of this ‘hi-tech cloud-computing’ trap of our world and descend into the beauty of things outside of us, yet one national poll several years ago found that nearly 40% of Americans had forgotten or misplaced an everyday item at least once over the past week. But the poll found that these "senior moments" were happening increasingly among non-seniors - Millennials, ages 18-34, were more likely than those 55+ to lapse on what day it was, where they put their keys, forgot to bring their lunch, or to take a bath or shower. The seniors, on the other hand, were only more likely to forget names.
The Generational Amnesia
Richard Fisher, BBC Senior Journalist and member of the BBC Future talks about “another type [of forgetfulness] that is less obvious, called ‘generational amnesia’, which has profound effects on the way that we see the world… Every generation is handed a world that has been shaped by their predecessors – and then seemingly forgets that fact. Consider how we think about technology. The current generation's idea of technology means smartphones, cryptocurrencies or the internet, but it wasn't always so: technology was once centred on pneumatics or steam, rather than silicon.”
Generational Amnesia, according to scientists and psychologists can harm our precious planet because of the shifting baseline syndrome.
The Shifting Baseline Syndrome…
Dr. Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist who developed the concept of Shifting Baseline Syndrome, says, “We transform the world, but we don’t remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don’t recall what was there.” This essentially means that every new generation adjusts to the collapses of the current world like the ones happening in our climate, cultural, social and even political.
Psychologist Peter Kahn of the University of Washington described this effect in the context of the black communities of Houston, Texas. “He was curious about children's perceptions of the quality of the environment they lived in. Through interviews, he found that they could easily describe what air pollution was,… as well as highlighting other cities that were polluted – but simultaneously they failed to show much awareness that Houston had become one of the US's most air-polluted cities. They just accepted it as the way things were. "How could these kids not know it? One answer is that they were born in Houston, and most had never left it; and through living there they constructed their baseline for what they thought was a normal environment.”
The humanity collectively "forgets" the homespun, ordinary world we once lived in and constructs a baseline, mostly which is deeply declining even though technology and access to knowledge advances.
We all distribute information via our "transactive memory system" which, in short, means relying on other people to fill in the blanks for us when we're having face-to-face encounters. It's a community affair that allows us to free up our brains for other things. Can't remember the name of that movie where Denzel's a pilot? Ask Bob, he'll know. Who was Germany's Chancellor after Willy Brandt? Elisabeth follows German politics, ask her. And so forth.” explains David Schrieberg, a contributor to Forbes. And this commune of collective memory system is now replaced by "off-load[ing] our memories to 'the cloud' just as readily as we would to a family member or a friend.”
One article in the Guardian on 100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying, is for the simple souls who would still pick the old ways while cherishing the new ones. Here are my few favourites:
6 Everyone has an emotional blind spot when they fight. Work out what yours is, and remember it.
22 Laugh shamelessly at your own jokes.
27 If possible, take the stairs.
30 Be polite to rude strangers – it’s oddly thrilling.
35 Eat salted butter (life’s too short for unsalted).
43 If you find an item of clothing you love and are certain you will wear for ever, buy three.
66 Don’t save things for “best”. Wear them – enjoy them.
68 Think about your posture: don’t slouch, and don’t cross your legs.
72 Always use freshly ground pepper.
94 Give compliments widely and freely.
96 Keep a book in your bag to avoid the temptation to doomscroll.
97 Listen to the albums you loved as a teenager.
And to end:
"More" by Alex Dimitrov
How again after months there is awe.
The most personal moment of the day
appears unannounced. People wear leather.
People refuse to die. There are strangers
who look like they could know your name.
And the smell of a bar on a cold night,
or the sound of traffic as it follows you home.
Sirens. Parties. How balconies hold us.
Whatever enough is, it hasn’t arrived.
And on some dead afternoon
when you’ll likely forget this,
as you browse through the vintage
again and again—there it is,
what everyone’s given up
just to stay here. Jewelled hairpins,
scratched records, their fast youth.
Everything they’ve given up
to stay here and find more.
May you hark back to the old dreamy days and simple joys of life, and your ordinary days sparkle under the first ray of the sun.
Till I write to you again,
- Anugrah
Note: To you who have been my diligent reader, I am highly grateful for the time and room that you give me in your heart. For in some way or another letting me know that you are echoing along. If you know even one person who will benefit from reading Delights of the Ordinary then feel free to share it with them.
Who am I?
Hi, I am Anugrah. I write Delights of the Ordinary for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone and love for life. My newsletter intersects culture, art, and inner health in our practical 9-5 job space. Feel free to share.
Delights of the Ordinary currently is a free publication. Yet it takes me many hours of effort to write and curate it. I may need lots of coffee to keep me going. You can :)
Stumbled on my publication? Explore all my previous editions here. And in case you don’t wish to spend time browsing then complement this post with The Antidote for Self-Doubt, We Imagine Because We Are Living or read about Decision Fatigue and Our Creative Life.
If you ever feel like dropping in a message or a comment, do not hesitate. We all can only thrive in people. We can be those ordinary creative beings who can change the world. You and me.
Much love..