Many people who have a great deal of time on their hands due to the leisure nature of many societies today engage in a large amount of random musings on our popular culture. There are so many things going on in society today that would make our grandparents blink their eyes in surprise that there almost isn’t enough time in the day to catalog them all.

As an example, how many people living back in the 1940s would understand or even be able to use a computer as it is designed today? To them, the word ‘computer’ meant a machine in a huge room that cost many millions of dollars. They are completely normal to us and we even use what are called ‘computer skins‘ to decorate them, though it’s a sure bet that our grandparents would have no idea what the term meant.

And when it comes to personal health and fitness — or at least giving the appearance of personal health and fitness — how many of our grandparents out there would even be familiar with the term 6 pack abs? It’s probably a good guess that not many of them would think of a six pack as being much more than something beer or soda was carried around in rather than something done to buff up abdominal muscles.

And as far as all of the body art that many of us seem obsessed with obtaining, the idea that one could design own tattoo activities that would result in a ‘body artist’ painting us with a literal universe of designs as if we were the Illustrated Man, who would’ve thought it could be so? Tattoos in those days were things that came out of parlors around Navy bases, usually.

Popular culture is so ubiquitous that we couldn’t come close to being able to escape it even if we wanted to. It confronts us on a 24/7 basis and does almost nothing we can do to keep it from intruding on us. Just about every person of the Amish faith can probably attest to that fact whenever they come close to being hit by a car while they’re out in their horse-drawn carriages.

These people focus on preventing the intrusion of popular culture into their lives and communities whenever they can. It’s probably a good bet that they consider us to be living far too much in the present and future and not nearly enough in the simple past we supposedly had. But, when looking back at that past, most people would probably never want to go back to that kind of living.

Popular culture will always be popular culture matter the era, though. When Elvis Presley made his debut, many people considered that he was the beginning of the end of society. Nowadays, people look back at those times and wonder what all the fuss was about. It’s fairly certain that people 50 years from now we’ll look back at these times and wonder why we were such fuddy-duddies.