Cody woke up on New Year’s Day with a dreadful feeling in his stomach. He wasn’t sick. And he hadn’t had a drop to drink in twenty years, so it wasn’t a hangover. It hadn’t risen to the level of fear, but he was clearly uneasy.
The feeling faded as he made coffee in his gray kitchen, with the gray, early-morning light of a gray day making the green walls gray. But even as the feeling in his stomach dissipated, his heart began to sink. Was it 2024 already? How could it have come to this? He remembered when the ‘20s were supposed to be the future. Far in the future. The stuff of science fiction. It hadn’t really hit him until this year – 2020 felt like barely the beginning of a new decade, really the tail end of the previous decade, which he now supposed he hadn’t ever expected to end. And ’21 and ’22 had felt early, too. He’d done his best not to think about the date the entire previous year, but now it was a whole new year, which meant they weren’t in the beginning of the 2020s anymore, but smack in the middle of them.
When it finished brewing, Cody took his coffee over to the window. He could see a bit of his reflection as he stared out at the gray grass. Lined face, graying hair, set eyes. He was old now.
He felt old. Not physically – sure, he had aches and pains, but who didn’t over the age of twenty-five? No, he felt old every time he looked at the television and saw a headline about “X” and had to remind himself that this was the company they used to call Twitter. And then he’d have to remind himself that Twitter was the one where you could only post short messages. He felt old every time he walked around a restaurant for ten minutes asking for a paper menu, only to be told to take his smartphone – as if he would have his smartphone at a restaurant – out and shine it on a strange-looking symbol. He felt very old every time he listened to the radio and heard that yet another of his favorite musicians had died.
Was it 2024 already?
Cody didn’t mind getting old. What he minded was that the world had changed. He wouldn’t have minded growing old in the world in which his parents grew old. VCRs and cassette tapes, the early days of PCs and cell phones, cars that didn’t have screens or sensors.
He heard his wife, Laura, coming down the stairs. She shared his misgivings. It wasn’t that either of them was out of place, but that the world was out of place. It hadn’t left them behind, it had gone someplace it never should have gone.
Cody turned back to the window. It wasn’t that the world had changed, but that it had taken such a turn for the strange. Things used to make sense. Now, Cody doubted even the college students could make sense of it. He wondered whether it was just him – maybe every generation experienced this at his age. But his son, when he saw his son, confirmed his suspicions. The world was strange now. Nobody completely understood it.
Past generations had struggled with the same feelings, Cody was sure. Cody had always felt that this experience was subjective, rather than an objective sense that the world was falling apart. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps things kept speeding up, and the children born today could handle this pace of life, but tomorrow – when life was even faster – they would lose the ability to keep up with their own children.
Cody wasn’t sure this was true, though. He didn’t believe human beings evolved that quickly. Would young people really be killing themselves if humans had evolved to live in this world?
Perhaps the world hadn’t actually sped up. Perhaps he had slowed down. He used to feel old, but now he really felt old.
He heard his wife pour herself a cup of coffee and walk back upstairs. Like many long-married couples, he and Laura could have a conversation without ever actually talking to one another. Or, to be more precise, they had several conversations which never quite ended and which could be picked up at any point and put down at any point and which could be resumed without either of them actually speaking.
From the way Laura had walked down the stairs and poured her coffee, Cody surmised that she was feeling much as he was that morning. She was two years his junior and looked ten years his junior, but Cody figured he looked five years older than he really was, so it evened out so to speak. At least that made sense in his head, although when he stopped to really think about it, maybe it didn’t.
Laura had never quite been comfortable with the modern world, whereas Cody had started out comfortable with it and had become uncomfortable with it over the course of his adult life. His wife didn’t have a smartphone, but he did, for his sins. His wife didn’t have a laptop, for that matter. She was a professor of theology at a small liberal arts college, and between a desktop at work and another one at home, she’d never needed a laptop.
Cody disliked the fact that his wife had fewer devices than he did, because he considered himself a curmudgeon. He liked to think that one of the benefits of growing older was being able to indulge one’s natural curmudgeonliness. Laura had a grace about her, even when she quietly insisted on remaining technologically in 2003. Cody wondered whether his own fist-shaking was due to the fact that he had little choice – he had to have a smartphone. He spent much of his working time in the digital world.
Cody had stumbled backwards into journalism, and he found himself now, nearing retirement age, as the editor in chief of a small, regional newspaper. His young staff weren’t particularly keen on his editorial line, but he was old-fashioned enough not to listen to any employee under the age of twenty-nine. He had reminded one young intern, when she had insisted that the paper hire a full-time reporter dedicated to covering Taylor Swift, that soon artificial intelligence would be doing her job. As far as he could tell, some of his youngest interns hadn’t even been born when Taylor Swift’s first album came out.