As a congenital and habitual loner, I do not socialize much, nor go out very much. Still, my wife wanted me to accompany her on Memorial Day (5/25/26) to go see the movie Pressure at an AMC movie theater showing in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and I said yes. Great movie, by the way.
My wife ordered the tickets online, and concessions too.
I have not been to a movie theater for perhaps 15 years, so this digital experience without paper ticket stubs for the gatekeeper to tear up, and paying cash for concessions was shockingly new to me. I felt overwhelmed and unable to function.
I had this strange feeling of being a Luddite—not opposed to the advances and changes per se—but feeling completely lost and unable to function in this drastically changed movie-going world.
I did not fit into this world, nor know how to act. I could not have succeeded in that world without my wife’s intervention.
Eric Hoffer has written in detail about how adults feel misfitted when they encountered a changed world, one which they are ill-trained and ill-equipped to function.
I suspect the world will change even faster going forward, and coping and adapting will be an ever greater challenge, perhaps a game at which only the young and the adult individuator is versatile and flexible enough to keep pace.
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