Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Getting Older
Episode 21 in a series of true rideshare stories
He is middle-aged, with multiple face tattoos, leaving a pizza place where all the drunk people convene as the bars close.
“I accidentally cut the line,” he tells me. “I didn’t realize they were lined up to order so I just walked up to the counter, and after I got my pizza I realized I just butted in front of like twenty people. Nobody even said anything.”
I laugh. “It’s all Gen Z kids in there. They’re too socially anxious to confront you.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” he says. “But everyone on TikTok probably knows I’m an asshole now.”
We get to talking about technology, about how person-to-person interaction between strangers is less and less common as the years go by, how digital substitutes for the human experience are taking the place of the real thing and too much of life is becoming something you do on the couch, in your underwear, alone.
“I guess I dodged it by just a few years,” he says. “Like, I like my phone, but I don’t feel addicted to it. And I like my tablet, but just so I can watch stuff on it. You know, I’ll be in bed with my wife, and I’ll watch my show on the tablet so I don’t have to watch her stupid thing on the TV.”
I don’t press the issue, but what he’s talking about is exactly what increasingly bothers me about technology. Even watching TV in bed, not long ago, was an experience we shared. The tablet is a way to have an experience alone so you don’t have to share one with someone else.
“My first cell phone was in the nineties,” he says. “You could see through it. That was the thing back then. Phones, pagers, whatever. They’d put them in clear plastic so you could see all the inner workings because that kind of technology was new and it felt so high tech.”
I tell him I remember. I had a Nintendo 64 that looked like that.
He turns wistful and nostalgic talking about the nineties, about concerts he went to and movies he saw, about how the The Matrix has proven weirdly prescient as time has gone on.
“My wife gets anxious about it. She worries about job security, how it seems like things are changing so fast it’s hard to imagine what we’re going to do when we get older, whether social security will be there, whether there will be jobs left that make any sense to us. I just try to enjoy myself. But then when she starts worrying about it, I start worrying about it.
“It’s weird. I’m 44. When did that happen? All this stuff seems like it was just a minute ago, and I’m still the same asshole. I’ve got all these friends with kids and stuff, and I’m the same idiot with the tattoos on my face. My wife’s gonna be 50 soon, and I’m not far behind her. Then we’re gonna be 60, 70… I can’t picture myself at 70. I still feel 20. But I guess you’re only as old as you feel.”
However old he might feel, based on the conversation I’ve just had with him, he’s definitely 44. And I’m 36, but I feel about the same.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.