nickel-and-dime - verb - greedily or unfairly charge someone many small amounts for minor services
adjective - of little importance, petty (Google)
Baby-Boomers tend to think that Millennials uniformly extoll the many virtues of the current technological wonders. However, this is a gross misconception as there are a few pragmatic, discerning minds within the generation that recognize their pitfalls. My daughter is one of them.
Yesterday, she and I were driving home from Easton, Pennsylvania after we and our young relations indulged in the not-so-sophisticated applied science at the Crayola Experience, and I expressed a somewhat related epiphany just to throw a wrench in the silence: "You know, your grandmother lived 81 years without encountering much in the way of change in gadgetry. The only major apparatus she had to figure out in order to use was the TV, which involved turning a knob." This minute observation touched a nerve in my daughter and stimulated a rant: "I know. And it isn't fair! Technology is taking us down as a society! The Smartphone opened the doors of destruction." She went on to elucidate how on a recent trip to Puerto Rico, her best friend found it necessary to nickel-and-dime her and her companions via Venmo. Apparently by way of the application–a payment service that allows individuals to split bills–she was able to charge all of her guests petty sums for petty services without their permission upfront. All of this was done within seconds via her Smartphone. The successive nickel-and-dime activity on Venmo amounted to a major breach in their friendship, which might not have occurred, let's say, if it were 2005 and she still had a flip phone; or better yet, it were 1977, PayPal was a wealthy cohort, and princess phones were still in vogue.
As a detractor of modern inventors and inventions that are motivated by money, I had to concur with my daughter that I miss a life with fewer complications. Those of us in our sixties, particularly, have gone from famine to feast, having been sucked into so much in the way of automation, mechanization, computers, telecommunications, robotics, etc. in such a comparatively short time that it is more than daunting. The whole kit and caboodle is so confusing and consuming that I often want to scream out loud, but my penchant for Zen-like peace interrupts me, reminding me that I have to accept what I can't change personally. Admittedly, there are times when I wish my daughter were less circumspect as she was born into this mess and didn't have to take the leap from virtually nothing virtual to just about everything like I did.
The bottomline is that we sentient humans create our own problems or at least, complications. What we have to remember is that good and evil will always be part and parcel of this life we are living. And we need to think profoundly along those lines before we create and market anything that may earn us instant monetary rewards. I would like to think that pioneers like Bill Gates and Martin Cooper had purely unselfish intentions, but I would be naive if I did. The sad truth is that many Millennials are upsetting the economic balance by quitting their jobs only to launch their own on-line companies with the dream of becoming the next Jeff Bezos-esque entrepreneurs floating in a bath of billions. How's this for a novel idea: When it comes to anything new and different, let's put altruism before greed so as not to sway a healthy equilibrium.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind listening to the tirades of more Millennials who yearn to return to a degree of simplicity. On a positive note, I hear that nostalgia is back in style :).
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