Capital Punishment: She's Last Year's Model

People in my age cohort, what I like to call aggressive middle age, even though we're not technically Boomers, do end up with a reputation for a resistance to new things/ideas and a sticky fetishization of older stuff drenched in a sweet sheen of nostalgia syrup. So far we haven't proven to be immune to Good Old Days syndrome, the root of many economic, social and political crimes of our predecessors, which we seem determined to outdo, to our great shame. Sometimes that kind of stodgy, stubborn wariness works out OK (we're going to end up having been absolutely correct about this AI bullshit), but there's an aphorism about stopped clocks that doesn't bear a full airing out here. Those, at least, get to be right twice.

I do try to resist the pull to turn and look behind me. I was horrified when at the end of the year Spotify told me my "listening age" was actually one year older than I actually am. I've made an effort to unashamedly game the system and weight my choices to at least music made this millennium, which I do already enjoy and listen to quite a lot of anyway, it just gets overwhelmed by my inclusion of, like, every Elvis Costello album. It would be way easier to accomplish if I could/would make the effort to create a dedicated Newer Stuff playlist, but the other part of getting older is being intimidated by technology but covering it up by gruffly pretending you're simply annoyed by it. "Make a playlist... with my hands? I thought this was supposed to be the 21st century?!" etc.

I'm not immune from holding on to the old. Take my children for example. As of this month, all of them will be right around the quarter-century mark, but you know what, I don't care. They're technically in the category of vintage children, but I don't really see the need to replace them. The expense alone (monetary, emotional, physical, storage...) is daunting enough, but also by not having more, I'm actually right on the cutting edge of young people trends. Not having kids in 2026 is like bleaching your tips in 2002. If any of us need a gauge of what we should be doing, I think Ryan Seacrest is still an acceptable benchmark.

What inspired this reflection on reflection is that I'm typing this at you on a brand new MacBook Air. I feel bad typing that as I can see my 2011 MacBook Pro just lying there, closed and cold but glowering at me from its slowly flashing power light across the room. They share an Apple ID login, so I know it's also actively listening to this as I type it.

There's no doubt it was time, but the Boomer in me can't help but acknowledge that the new machine lacks the romance of the old. It just hums along, very pointedly without any noticeable hum of any kind, in the same kind of sterile solid-state silence that keeps new new technology enigmatic, inscrutable, at arm's length. All the chirps and purrs and whines and sometimes random crescendoing click-click-click-clickclickclickCLICK CLICK CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK! the old one would make at least let me know it had a heartbeat and maybe, I could let myself wonder, a soul?

This new one also doesn't do any of the romantic things to keep me engaged and on my toes, like dropping from 80 percent battery power to zero out of nowhere. Its unsubtle efficiency inadvertently outlines the spaces around what it doesn't have: the petulance, the moods. It lacks any kind of drama. The crisp ticking of its effortless keyboard simply gets the job done instead of asking questions. There's no negotiation, no tension, no art in it... at least not yet.

Sure, my old machine gave me 15 solid years. That's forever in laptop age, and sure, we had developed our own level of deep understanding. There are things I'll never have with this new machine, like the coquettish, almost fetishistic, withholding of access to a CD I last inserted in my MacBook Pro's drive in I think 2017 that it still refuses to eject, no mater what combination of remedies I attempt. This thing doesn't even have a drive, of any kind. I couldn't stick anything in it, no matter how badly I wanted to.

But it was time to move on. New things have merit, that is true. It's pretty, brighter, weighs less, but now I've found the one cliché about middle aged men trading in something they had for something new. This does have some of ths same pitfalls as trading in your wife for a new girlfriend though, because this has  has "Apple Intelligence" in it, which means some part of it processes ideas in a way I think is stupid or naïve and will never engage with without condescension or dismissal. As much as I try, parts of me are going to stay within the statistical modeling of predictable behavior. I am but a man.