I Am Wistful For Things I Never Even Liked

Portrait of a changing America: “As the beer can nears its 75th birthday in January, many hobbyists are crying in their brew over their inability to lure young people to a pastime that hooked many of them when they were youngsters in the 1970s. ‘We’d ride bikes to each other’s houses and start trading cans,’ says Dan Baker, 47, an Illinois collector who started when he was 10. ‘That’s what all the kids did back then.’”

There’s something kind of sad about this article. I was thinking about ships in a bottle the other day: Do people still make those? I wonder what we’re losing in this new era where you’re never bored enough that building model airplanes or trading baseball cards or even biking for bagels seems like an exciting diversion. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I would never in a million years do any of those things, but there was always something comforting about the fact that someone did. Ah, well, maybe they’ll come up with with a beer-can-collecting app.