now at @mayfriend

i wanna get a new blog. like, a new main. but keep @mayfriend as my handle (bc i love it and its what i identify as my ‘name’ online now). doth anyone know how to just like. nuke my blog so it’s fresh (and most importantly, my tag things are clear) without destroying it entirely/having to make a new tumblr account that isn’t connected to my other sideblogs which i want to keep

i figure i can just change the url to ‘mayfriend-archive’ or something and make a new one under mayfriend, but that’d still leave it as my main i think, and i’d still get notifs and stuff?? i just wanna leave this bad boy as a ghost or smth, as i’ve done before with previous mains, but. i didn’t have sideblogs before.

When my mom was in college, she just wouldn’t have been capable of predicting what college would be like for me. I took a full semester of college from 5 hours away because I can virtually attend class through a pocket sized device that projects my image and voice into a shared virtual classroom where I can interact with my professor and other students. I wrote research papers without physical access to a library because I could read my college library’s books on my computer.

Except they didn’t. His father before him didn’t do this, and your son will not live like you. This is not enshrined in tradition. This is not life. This is not how things are, or have been, or how they ever been. Look at it. This beautiful, ageless world of saving for your kids’ college and paying off mortgages and nuclear families. There is no way of life to pass down to your children, no tradition, nothing your father gave you that you can give to your son! You were born into a world that is unintelligible and inaccessible to the children you wanted to inherit it, and you and your children will both die in a world that is as foreign to you both!

I don’t envy the Boomer generation, nor do I have some kind of conceited disdain for them for not being able to adapt to now. So, so much of what defines our lives happened for the first time in their lifetime, and the absence of those things cannot be explained to us. Do you remember what it was like before television? Well...what is “it?”

My mum did her university coursework on a typewriter. My dad paid someone to type up his MRes thesis. I can’t imagine writing that kind of work by hand. CORRECTING that kind of work by hand.

But rappid change has been going on for a while now. Electricity. The automobile. Movies. TV. And before that, the industrial revolution. The printing press.

The 1920s were a lot like now in terms of rapid pace of change, generational shifts, wealth disparity, the rise of fascism...

I think we all grow up with the expectation that we’re being taught the way the world is, has always been, and will always be. Change had been speeding up since the Industrial Revolution, and it’s been turbocharged by the Internet, but the expectation that we’ll live the same lives as our parents is, I think, in-built - as we’re primed to learn from them what will keep us safe; it’s why children learn so much more easily. At the same time, I think having learned something of the world for oneself, it’s reasonable that every generation should then come to question what they were taught and push for change.

And there have been seismic shifts before. Rome fell.

Wild Swans is a hell of a book to read about how different one generation’s lives can be from another’s. Jung Chang’s grandmother had bound feet and was concubine to a warlord. China went through several changes of regime before the rise of Communism and the Cultural Revolution. The book was published in 1991, before the World Wide Web, and the pace of change over three generations of women is breathtaking.

So yeah, I agree that change is speeding up, and that changes in communication technology speeds things up like nothing else (see: the changes that follow the printing press - HUGE), but also, big changes between generations isn’t that new.

It’s part of growing up to learn that the way the world was when your parents were born doesn’t have to be, and likely won’t be, how it will be when you leave it.