Vine Is Dead and Why That Makes Me Old

I just saw that Vine has closed it’s doors. In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, Vine was an APP like Twitter but instead of 140 characters it was seven second videos.

I never had it. I barely knew about it.

Somehow happy while being oblivious to certain social media. And they said it couldn't be done.

But here is what I am now realizing. The closure of Vine means that one day in the future there will be a generation of Americans who look back nostalgically on the “Vine” era the way I look back on the Chia Pet Era or Hair Metal. “Dude, remember Vine? Those were the days”. “Life used to be so simple.”

Inevitably technology will advance to the point where people will look at the Vine era as a time of simple technology that is seemingly so archaic in hindsight. Future humans will be able to accomplish the same feats in technology without all of the hard work. “I remember when if you wanted to take a 7 second video of a cat falling down stairs and immediately send it to the world you had to click a single button and upload it to Vine. Now we just imagine it happening, blink twice and it goes directly into the eyes of every one of our “Blink” friends.”

But I won’t have that nostalgia. That is my point. Being gone for 12 years not only affects my knowledge of popular culture now, but it will also leave me out of the loop when people are reminiscing on the past decade in the future.

In this instance I realize I have two choices. I can either spend the next three months furiously watching VH1 “I Love the 2000’s” in an attempt to catch up, or I can be smug (lazy) and act like I’m above pop-culture.

I can fill my shelves with used-books and become part of the “I don’t own a TV” crowd, passing off my lack of general knowledge as calculated ignorance.

As option 2 takes way less time, it sounds good, but I don’t know if I could hack it.

There is nobody I despise more than the “I don’t own a TV” crowd. ISIS is obviously worse, but they also don’t own TVs so I’ll leave it at that. The contempt I have for the “I Don’t own a TV” people falls in line with my slight annoyance with atheists who proudly boast that they don’t believe in God they believe in science, yet rarely are trained scientists.

Lazy doesn’t equal knowledge.

Do I really want to become one of these insufferable people?

But what other choice do I have? No matter how much Pandora I listen to (not even sure if that is a relevant reference) I’m not going to know every cool indie band from the last decade. And I know that if I attempt to catch up I will latch onto the wrong band and end up sounding like the Dad driving his teenagers to soccer practice and blasting Nickelback. “Kids you gotta check out this cool new tune”.

Thankfully, there is a third choice. I could retire from pop-culture completely. Accept defeat and be known as the “I don’t know anything” guy but in a self-deprecating, not self-aggrandizing way. Everybody loves the “I don’t know shit” guy! Non-threatening. Easy-going. And who ever lost a job because they couldn’t name the little person in Lord of the Rings?

Ok great. Decided.

This is me coming out as an old man. I’m done.

I will just have to live with the fact that for the rest of my life I’ll be left out of every conversation reminiscing about that killer cupcake place that was big in 2008. I’ll shrug my shoulders and plead ignorance when asked about my favorite Breaking Bad episode. I can’t go back now. I’m in.

I should hold a press conference to announce this. Can I Vine it?