Dear LPG,

I know that new ideas are coming at us all the time, but it occurs to me that so many of them are designed for our convenience and while convenience is seen as another word for time saving, do they not diminish our lifestyle to some extent.

The internet has made the need for flicking through the pages of an encyclopaedia or the yellow pages redundant, although I must agree that Googling with the touch of a screen or keypad is much quicker than having to turn the pages of a book.  Calculators became more widely available in the mid-1990s and so many of our grandchildren that went to school since then have no grasp of mental arithmetic or their times tables. Would your children or grandchildren reach for a bit of scrap paper and a pen when asked to do a basic mathematical calculation, or would they opt for the calculator app on their mobile phone?

More and more mothers decide to go out to work these days, but when I think of all the things that young mothers were expected to do in the 1960s, even if being a mother was their only job, I wonder how we ever coped with the full and part time jobs we did in addition to all that?   I don’t think the jobs have changed but “convenience gizmos” have made all the difference. 

When we do the washing these days we just put the clothes in the washing machine with a bit of soap and it does the rest, including drying them in a lot of cases.  We older mothers would spend a good chunk of the weekend standing over a twin tub and then hanging the clothes out if the weather would allow.  So much more clothing doesn’t need to be ironed these days which is a time-saver too.  Shopping is another thing that used to be done almost daily because there were fewer fridges and freezers around, but that cooling cupboard which is found in nearly every kitchen nowadays allows us to do most of it weekly, or even less frequently, while more and more people use the internet and have the shopping delivered now; something I have learned to do since the whole pandemic era.  

I am a female of a certain (old) age and I know that many of my friends have spent a lot of pandemic phone time discussing the very subject of how things used to be and how much easier life has been for the generation of mothers and wives that follow us. The consensus is that our times were better, and these times are leaving our younger married daughters and granddaughters with easier day-to-day lives than we had but the saddest aspect of the whole thing, is that those younger people will become the future pensioners before we know it.  I wonder if in twenty or so years’ time, they will be talking and writing about how simple life was in their youth (which is our old age where there are so many gadgets that are too complicated for us to understand).  By then they will take 2021’s newest gadgets for granted, but they will be doing their best to come to terms with the even more confusing gizmos of their future?

How quickly the new and confusing becomes accepted as it makes way for the even more new and more confusing… 

AK, Bellingham