Last night I watched the new Netflix show “The Get Down.” It is the story the Bronx in the 1970’s. It’s a bit weird but incredibly fun to watch.
There is one moment I want to focus on. The protagonist “Zeke” wants to get his love interest a gift. She has a favorite album. One that is incredibly hard to get. So hard to get that a lot of people think it doesn’t exist that it was just a rumor.
Think about that for a second. There was no way to confirm that the record existed. You couldn’t go onto the artist’s Wikipedia page. You couldn’t check iTunes. You had to go off of what your friends had heard from their friends.
So Zeke goes off in search of this album. Across town, to a record store because his friend heard that they have a copy. He finds it. There is only one. Someone else wants it, and there is a footrace, a fight, and threats of a stabbing all over this album.
Watching this you can’t help but be struck by how fundamentally things have changed. Now, if you want to know if an album exists you just pull out your phone and look it up. Now, if this girl wanted an album, she would just download it for herself. And now, if Zeke wanted the vinyl as a gift he would pull up amazon.com on his phone and buy it with two-day shipping.
We have become so accustomed to being able to get virtually anything that we want within a day or two days. One business, Amazon, has fundamentally changed our lives. But, it is so easy to forget.
Legions of people believe that things are getting worse. That someone needs to make the world great again.
They long for a world where you have to spend half your day trekking across a city based on a rumour that the album you are looking for might be there. And more than that, you can’t even be sure it exists!
We live in a time of abundance. Where we can get almost anything we want, whenever we want it. The inflation adjusted salary may not have changed, but you can do exponentially more today than you could just forty years ago.
We are blessed to be alive right now. And although nostalgia can be fun, let’s not forget how good we have it.
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