Page 20 - The Lost Ways

My parents were pretty old when I was born, and my nana and granddad were

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born in the latter half of the 19 century. Consequently, I grew up “old fashioned.”
The tales my parents and grandparents told me were of times that were very different.

They told me of a time when you made the most of what you had, no matter how little
that was. My mother would tell me of how it was common for richer families to pass down
clothes to those poorer children in the community—and the children were thrilled with
their “new” clothes.

My younger brother and I would come home from school to my grandparents’ house,
where we’d be fed soup made using the previous day’s leftovers and bones the butcher
was throwing out; it was the best soup I have ever tasted. My parents and grandparents

were not only from a different age but also from a different philosophy.

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Here we are, human beings in the 21 century, several lifetimes and a world away from
our grandparents and their ways. Have we become better at living? Has modern
technology given us a better world to live in than our grandparents had? I think not.

I watch as we become ever more expectant that the world owes us a living. Consumerism
has reached epic proportions; people feel aggrieved if they don’t own the latest gadget
and struggle to cope without the Internet, unable to entertain themselves.

I find it ironic that we talk about the Internet “connecting the world.” The Internet of
Things, or the IoT as it’s known, is the latest buzzword, where the excitement levels about
interconnectivity between human operators and devices are at dizzying levels. The truth

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