playing Pokemon Go has been a really revealing look at America’s generational gap for me.
all the adults in my life– my parents, my older coworkers– brought the topic of Pokemon Go up to me unsolicited and presented it as a sort of curio of the day, ie, “Can you believe this is happening? how weird, how bizarre, how strange.” folks shaking their heads and saying how dangerous it is, how Kids These Days Are, and how they just can’t wrap their heads around the appeal of it. what’s the point? and it’s dangerous. it was alarming for me to hear them feed back to me these headlines they saw in the news about robbers and car crashes. I thought, surely this can’t be all they are hearing about it? they can’t all be afraid of a free-to-play app?
the thing is, they aren’t in the communities online that circulate the stories about beating out depression or anxiety to go outside and play, initiating conversation with strangers about squirtles that are just over the hill here I’ll walk you over there, the lemonade stands at pokestops run by children, the volunteer dogwalkers. they see Millennials with their noses in their phones and that’s the end of that conversation.
yesterday an elderly couple approached me while I was playing and asked me to explain the game to them. I catch a pidgey with them. I explain to them that I know those kids across the street are playing too, because they have the telltale signs– eyes down, fingers swiping. I can go over there and ask them about the gym they are defending, what team they are on, if they caught the lapras I saw lurking around the corner. we immediately have something in common. I tell her I see it really bringing people together.
then this little old lady rolls her eyes at me and tells me to get a life, and I think that perfectly captures the gap between our generations– willing to ask, but not willing to listen or understand.
“Get a life?” How is this not having a life? Going out and meeting people and socialising? Is there a new definition of getting a life that I wasn’t told about?
When you boil a large scale event, something that can easily mean the world to someone, down to, as you said, a ‘curio of the day’ it becomes much easier to discredit it, but realistically where is their bar?
I think people too easily forget that the great cultural events of a generation were accidents and were not looking on with with high regard at the time. I’ve been researching Woodstock so much recently, but I can promise you, what it became was an accident. No one’s over 40 will tell you now, though, that it wasn’t important.
History isn’t a series of incredible events that everyone took part in because they were incredible. It’s mediocre events made special by those who enjoyed it and looked back in it. In 30 years, I have no doubt Pokemon Go will be someone’s Woodstock