Grateful #11 - My generation

My generation - not just the blanket GenX, but specifically the very, very end of Gen X/beginning of Gen Y, is the most unique generation.  I had the experience of growing up without a cell phone, high speed internet, and many of the every day technologies that have become common place in our world.  However, as I entered college, I was transitioned into living on my own as well as the powers of the world wide web.  When I graduated, I bought my first cell phone.  This gave me and my peers a very different outlook on life.  We never had to text our parents about where we were and who we were with; they just trusted that we would come home and we would be safe.  And we did.  And we were.  mostly.  But because child and parent couldn't stay in constant contact, we had to rely on our spoken word to one another.  While kids today have access to every tiny technology they can think of, they don't have the patience or knowledge about how to use them.  Because they've been bombareded by so many different things always buzzing around them, they can't sit still long enough to actually navigate through the countless articles or apps in front of them.  They simply move on to the next thing.  My little pocket of a generation had to sit and navigate through microfiche, dictionaries, and encyclopedias long before we were able to google anything, so we have endurance.  And because we were introduced to this technology at just the right age - somewhere in our late teens, early 20's, we were still young enough to learn fast and learn well.  We remember what it's like to have to write notes by hand, resourceful enough to know how to find those notes on-line, and disciplined enough to follow through.  I got a new cell phone today - the amount of technology in that phone is almost ridiculous.  I will spend hours figuring out every button, every app, every setting -whereas the generation below me would skip over the things they couldn't figure out in 8 seconds and the generation above me would not concern itself with that new fangled technology.  So today, I am grateful to be a tiny part of a generation that happened to grow up at just the right time.