Our Obsession With Being Current All the Freaking Time

I think it’s best put by Tower of Power. The question on everyone’s mind is “what is hip?” Since I’ve been trying to get freelance gigs this summer, I’ve noticed that everyone is looking for someone who keeps up with current trends and junk like that. What is it with people and always being current?

Any history major will tell you that it’s very important to remember the past, but that’s never really applied in life. We all just want to be on top of the latest and greatest, but if we don’t know our past and what was “great” then, then how can we truly know what is the greatest?

I mean really, any idiot can just set a Google alert or whatever in order to get updates, but in order to understand what happened before, that takes actual intelligence. I don’t get it. Maybe people think that it proceeds in a linear fashion: you understand the past and then get to the current stuff. But that’s not really how it works. Honestly, I could look up anything that happened recently and just put it into my own words and make it seem like I know about it. When I don’t really, I just know what I read in that one Wikipedia article. (And I love Wikipedia, nothing against that, everything against people that don’t put in effort.) And also, how exactly do you prove that you can keep up with trends on a resume? The people hiring have to be having as much trouble as those applying.

Of course, I googled this question to see what would come up, but nothing really did. Just articles on how to stay current. No one seems to be seeing this as an issue, which it isn’t for most of the time, it’s just the times when it’s being current for the sake of being current when it’s an issue.

I guess the reason is that, collectively, society has stopped caring about the past. We just want the instant gratification of what’s happening now. And that’s dangerous, because those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it!