A tale of one Boomer’s struggle to grasp the concept of the passage of time:
My father mentioned ordering a pair of blue jeans from Jet Jeans or some such. Some inescapable booming ensued.
He knowingly ordered cheap jeans from a website. How he learned of it, I don’t know. Anyway…
He gets the jeans in the size he ordered. Measurements are wrong in each dimension.
He calls the company, to see about returning. He’s given three options, none of which are what he is expecting, because his expectations were set 50 years ago.
An honorable company would…
Dad, you’re applying a thought process that has not been in play for some time. Don’t buy cheap crap from randos on the internet.
He cannot adjust to the present Nothing Works Anymore reality. Even when he knows better, high-trust is the default setting.
And this is why you will never convince them that being invaded by foreigners is a bad thing. They literally cannot conceive of anything outside of their 1950s reality.
But it’s also a lesson for we Gen Xers to not allow ourselves to get locked into our 80s assumptions. Although, to be honest, I’m not even sure what those would be. I mean, the world appears to be even more screwed than we thought it was when we were busy surviving nuclear destruction at the hands of the Soviets, followed by acid rain, an ice age, running out of fossil fuels, only to face the cruel onset of rap.