Do you get the feeling that too often, new experiences are inferior to old ones? That the hip novelty bandwagon goes too fast, and the new doesn't stay "new" as different newly-correct behaviors and products are forced upon us ...?
One longs for Old Experience, like the practice of turning a blind eye to other people's habits, like accepting that the world is full of diverse opinion, and like getting Life Guidance from literary classics, not social media.
Thankfully we can still have that lovely Old Experience of turning a printed page. Of looking up a word in a printed dictionary. Of receiving written notes from friends, rather than pinging "notifications".
What about the old experience of physicality when not your smartphone but you yourself knew where you are on a landscape? And there on the landscape, you might see surviving woodland, or smell the scent of mown grass. You might even see some, an old-fashioned sweep of shimmering emerald lawn.
That's the delight of heritage neighbourhoods with Settler Architecture (home-y houses with flowery gardens settled on quiet streets, and pet cats roaming free). And there, is the old-fashioned certainty that you're not being spied on from every wall and roof-top by CCTV.
There's also that old-fashioned habit of people sticking to a gender, or if they choose to gender-blend they just quietly go ahead without a political song-and-dance as if we're all at an endless performance of "SOGI, the Musical".
One longs for an Old Experience of public clock towers and pay-phones, of land-lines, paper money, cheque-books, and parking meters and tip jars that take coins. Without coins, what will we throw into the wishing well when we make a wish? (How about our smartphones?) And what might we wish for? A Society For the Preservation of Old Ways would work well for some.
Anyone can try the Old Experiences that give relief from the downward drag of post-post-post modernity.
