Tim Urban, of WaitButWhy fame, coined the term "Die Progress Unit" (DPU) as to how far in the future an individual would have to travel to be literally shocked to death by the degree of change. This is the deadly variant of George C. Clarke's less lethal observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I'm going to insert a psychological condition midway between the two: Boomercatatonia. This is the state virtually all Boomers now find themselves in trying to comprehend the world they now inhabit, which has precious little resemblance to ANYTHING they experienced growing up. My anecdotal observations suggest that most Boomers are withdrawing from active engagement in the real world because they don't know how to engage in that world. My Greatest Generation father managed solitaire on his desktop, full stop. E-mail was beyond him. I, in turn, am unable to grasp the point of paying ridiculous sums of cryptocurrency for non-fungible tokens. The nouns in that sentence are all newborns that bear no relationship to ANYTHING that I have experienced. Pardon me while I curl up into a ball on the floor.
