Future Shock Has Arrived!

Most, if not all, will relate to this post topic.

I recently had the pleasure of both our adult daughters in the house to celebrate the younger one’s birthday. The older daughter flew in from out of state to be with us for a few days before returning.

Over that twenty-four hour period, I received over 125 text messages; despite having repeatedly in past sending “STOP” texts to most of them and deleting them as spam. You see, while I NEVER donate to any candidate via my smartphone, but via my desktop computer, it’s obvious that my phone #, which is a required part of the donation form online, is sold by those I have donated to, to other candidates and various organizations.

This has clearly become an out-of-control situation in that in the process of AGAIN responded to all of those text messages with “STOP”, there’s the replies which are a text message saying that I’ve been successfully removed. Which means that I then have to go through all 125 or more replies to hit the delete button and hit the “Delte and Report as Junk option.” This takes about an hour! A definite waste of time.

The frustrating thing about it is that, a week later, having deleted those, there will be another 125 in a twenty-four hour period from different texters, who, I’m convinced, are paid texters who send out these annoyances because they’ve purchased the deleted prior texters who sold them to the new ones!

I’m suspecting there’s an app for that too! This is how the predictions from the book of a while ago about Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler, has come true. We’;re caught in a vicious cycle of spending our time clearing our smartphones and ending up looking like a 13 year old kid walking themselves into a ditch ahead they didn’t see because their face was buried in the smartphone.

The next gen-zer who comes up with a solution for successfully dealing easily with this will no doubt become the next Mark Zuckerberg, or we’ll all spend most of our time just deleting text messages. My suspicion is that there’s already something out there to deal with this overwhelming issue… for an almost 72 year old.

If there are any under 35ers out there reading this, stop laughing. When I was under that age, flip phones were just coming onto the market, because they weren’t the bricks with an antenna that only millionaires could afford before the flip-phone. You wait until AI goes full-blown… you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!