A visitor from the 1980s would assume everyone today has friends weathering either massive crises or devastating loneliness and demand to be returned the age of tech-geek Luddites

At any point in history, all teenagers and young adults believe, or could easily be convinced, that their transformation into nominal adults is occurring in concert with unprecedented technological advances that universally affect the communication or commercial landscape. All of these speculators are, for once in their lives, correct.

Today’s high-schoolers and college-age persons, for example, are becoming mostly sentient just as a spate of remarkably human-like literary and other artistic output is emerging thanks to technology that’s not at all new, merely faster at data-processing and more invasive than ever before and afforded a cool name (“AI”). But every generation has enjoyed the advent of unexpectedly powerful electronic toys. When I was in high school, satellite phones were rare (so were non-government-operated satellites, compared to now) but available in backpacks and owned by the same kinds of people today—all men—who own high-end Teslas and speak in needlessly loud voices even while shitting, showering, or both.

Some kids in the late 1980s also had pagers. While these kids believed themselves to be cool, and indeed inspired envy among some members of the student body at my high school, they were actually morons, because they were the only kids in the school who couldn’t easily create excuses for being unfindable by their parents for an entire evening while still technically being accountable (for example, “I’m spending the night at John’s” often meant “We’re camping somewhere in the woods by that I-93 rest area”).

And the 1980s, for those of us who had IBM PCjrs in their homes, was actually a time of rapidly expanding home-computer technology. Most people did not and still do not know this, because no one really cared to own home computers until the late 1990s, when, despite the bane of dial-up Internet baud rates, PCs became effective devices for tormenting huge numbers of people simultaneously from the comfort of home and receiving a stream of long-weary “knock knock”-style jokes from over-75 relatives.

Had I been given a ten-minute glimpse into the early 2020s thirty-five years ago—say, ten minutes of silent video footage of a large city park at 1 p.m. on a Saturday—and asked to describe and hypothesize about this vista, I don’t think it would have taken me (or most people) long to determine that the boxes people were carrying were telephones, and that these telephones were versatile to the point of serving as crude computers. But I would have been aghast at how many people were not just carrying but using their teleboxes even while exercising, riding a bike, driving, and so on. I would have been tempted to conclude that it was literally or functionally mandatory for people to carry these with them, and may have believed that America was in an unending crisis based on how many people insisted on talking even during activities like running whose main benefits include being unavailable for talking.

I often write about Boulder as if it’s axiomatic that the place boasts a remarkably high percentage of adults who continually engage in asinine and selfish behaviors, sometimes with obvious intent, at other times obliviously. The few extended out-of-Colorado trips I have taken in the past five years has convinced me that this is true—it’s always been true of affluent areas—but also that it’s part of a trend that may be happening more slowly in places like southeastern Idaho and southwestern Virginia, but will eventually subsume all inhabited ZIP codes.

Maybe you gomers can tell me. Within a twenty-four hour period that began on Sunday afternoon, I experienced the following:

A. A couple in effect “walking” two cats without using leashes on a street that dead-ends in a large public park, taking up the whole width of the street by walking slowly along the imaginary midline and encouraging the cats, skulking along about fifty feet behind, to do the same. I emerged into this quiet drama with Rosie while doing an easy run on Sunday evening and chose to go far around this whole dipshit procession rather than blunder through the middle of it and scatter the cats. There is a woman around the corner from me who has been training two cats to walk on leashes in her own driveway, and while she clearly wants others to see her doing this, she’s at least containing the ridiculousness in two ways the aforementioned couple were not.

2. A woman riding a bike on a path with her 3- or 4-year old daughter in a backward-facing seat, ignoring her daughter's yells of "Mommy! Mommy! That dog is being good!" because she was having a phone-yap session via headset when she passed us from behind. The girl seemed to be saying this because Rosie is very good about keeping to one side of any shared path and encouraging me to do the same.

(One thing that seems like it should be a fictitious trope, but isn’t: Toddlers yelling “Mommy! Mommy!” or “Daddy! Daddy!” to get a parent’s attention. It’s rarely just “Mommy!” and it’s never “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” unless the child is chronically ignored or a precociously chronic rascal.)

III. A man training his approximately six-year-old son (or some kid) to ride a bike on a busy public path, with the duo taking up most of the width of the path because the dad was riding right beside the kid in order to keep a supportive hand on the kid's back. This was on a gently downhill stretch of concrete, on the same path as the vignette described in offense B) above, and about ten minutes later.

Opinions vary as to which of these behaviors is the most holistically inconsiderate. A mom teaching her young child that she doesn’t matter seems like a dick move, but at least she wasn’t putting me or her daughter at unusual risk of a mishap. The guy with the kid on a bike could have done what he was doing on any number of side streets nearby, so he struck me as an ostentatious jackbag, probably nothing worse. And the couple leashlessly “walking” their felines? Well, at least one of those poor fucking cats will be dinner soon; anyone who lets their cats roam free even a mile or two of east of the start “official” mountain-lion territory is tacitly offering their pets up for a meal.

I really don’t think these things are at all common in most parts of the U.S. The unwillingness of people to leave their phones at home or at least in their cars has pervaded every urban and rural corner of the country, but most locales have a natural cap on bullshit like 50-year-old semi-successful tech-bros riding skateboards down steep dead-end streets near the Blue Line.

Say what you will about the opioid-addled white trash scattered forlornly across the nation’s trailer-park-dotted plains, or about gun-toting inner-city coloreds blasting each other into kingdom come at breathtaking rates. (“Coloreds” is far easier to type than “people of color” or “colored people,” but obviously means the same thing, so I’m hoping it catches on with the crowd most concerned with anti-black racism: Fat white women with administrative jobs in local government, dour expressions, and irritable bowel syndrome leading to a persistently smelly ass and a concomitantly acidic attitude, especially toward attractive women and men who don’t resemble dildos with ears.