I started driving the Big Rig in January 2011. I would make a run to Laredo, and go to the big TA Truck Stop there and buy lunch. There were big tables outside that sat 8 customers. I would sit there for an hour, and talk to 7 other truck drivers, about road conditions, about the unfair trooper at the scales on I-35 s. of San Antonio, about that big thunderstorm back on I-10 near Houston. We would talk about our work and our lives, it was great. You had to have a cell phone to drive a truck in that year, we all had flip phones. The Iphone was not on the scene yet.
I was at that same truck stop in 2018, seven years later. Sat at that same table at the TA, seven other drivers were there. But now, they all had Iphones. Nobody spoke a word, they all were texting on the Iphones. I still had my flip phone, I ate my meal in silence.
Just in that seven year span, the art of face to face speech, of looking someone in the face and talking with them, had been lost.
70,000 years ago Modern Humans in Europe were sitting around the fire, eating dinner and talking to each other. 70,000 years lost in one 7 year span.
Rest in Hell, Steve Jobs.
