Translation: “he is too young to appreciate the car.”
Anymore, if you’re under 45, you don’t appreciate “fine” anything. What you have in its place is an engaging user experience. Unless of course you happen to have had a father who appreciated fine things, in which case you know the difference. This last sentence I didn’t appreciate until my kids got old enough to show me they appreciate subtlety, which is of course the province of the fine.
My $.02... I might be a horrible translator though.
maw
What I have noticed is that younger folk (and even some older folk) tend to believe that most everything is disposable, and is just replaced rather than repaired. It's a by-product of -- but not entirely due to -- consumer culture. There was a time, which ended with the W123/W124/W126 era, that buying a Mercedes-Benz was a "once in a lifetime" experience. Few if any Benzes were leased, and if they were, it was to businesspeople. And you had that Mercedes-Benz, you took care of the car and owned it until you could drive it no longer. And it was engineered to be repaired and maintained. And then you passed it on your family when you kicked the bucket.
In recent decades, it's become all about "engaging user experience" (
@maw1124's term, but a good one), and flashiness, and then moving on to the next thing. Nobody buys much anymore (least of all a car) to own and to hold onto for decades.
I was just thinking this morning -- I saw a statistic that 59% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. I'd bet if folks made two simple lifestyle choices -- a) got rid of their car debt (i.e. no lease or car payment of any kind) and b) got rid of their iSamsung-whatever phones (and perhaps used an old paid-off phone for 5 years) it would remove much of the pressure that is put on their paychecks.
I look around here on my desk as I type this. My eye falls upon the Bostitch stapler that is sitting in front of me. It was my grandfather's, vintage 1950s. I proudly use it, and think of him every time I do. I enjoy knowing that 99 years ago, my grandfather lived less than two miles from where I am sitting, as a US Naval Academy midshipman (class of 1925). He'd be so thrilled to know that the young midshipman we sponsor (class of 2023), used his stapler just last weekend for a Naval Academy class project.
Or my Hewlett-Packard 11c RPN calculator, which I purchased for myself in 1984. One of my first "big" purchases ($75) with saved paper-route money, which was for high school physics class. Still with the corner of a physics workbook page inside the battery compartment, put there with my hand-written name and grade (12th) just in case it was stolen.
I showed it to my son (who is now 20) one time some years ago. He just shook his head -- he couldn't understand why I'd have and use a 1980s calculator, when I could use the one on my phone. I grinned to myself, knowing he'd never in his lifetime grasp the importance (and efficiency) of
Reverse Polish Notation. Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez were WAAAY more important than RPN.
