Am I A Dinosaur?

I’ve been contemplating this adjective for a while. Merriam-Webster defines a dinosaur as, “(2) someone or something that is no longer useful or current : an obsolete or out-of-date person or thing”.

I feel out-of-date, perhaps even a little obsolete. Perhaps it’s my age (I’m well over the half-century mark). But some of the things I’m seeing:

• Witches no longer doing their own thinking. If a question arises, they post it onto social media and let the public answer it rather than do a little research and/or just sit and cogitate on the matter.
• Young’uns don’t even write their own spells anymore. They just look it up in one of a myriad of books on the market today. I will admit I had no formal teaching but it seems to me creativity and personalization are a couple of ingredients in any good spell. After all, no two situations are identical in every respect. That said, writing a spell from scratch would take time and that doesn’t fit with the gotta-have-it-now mentality that seems to permeate society.
• Then there’s the whole, “I did a spell for [this] last night and boy, was it powerful!” on social media. Just an announcement? Bragging? While it probably originates with Eliphas Lévi (1810-1875), To Know, To Will, To Dare, To Keep Silent seems to have fallen by the wayside.
• There’s an app for that. I admit technology has made life easier. I wouldn’t have the lifestyle I have if it weren’t for computers and the internet. But it only goes so far. As an example: a lot of people do divination, usually with cards or runes. Many do it on a daily basis to see what the day has in store for them. But many of them do it by pressing a button on their phone and let a computer somewhere shuffle the cards or muddle the runes.  Last I knew, the cards/runes were affected by your personal energy as you shuffled/muddled them. How can an impersonal computer, who knows how many hundreds or thousands of miles away, pick up on that energy then display the right card/rune for you?
• People bemoaning that they can’t get close to nature because they live in an apartment in the city (and by extension, just can’t do a spell for this or that). I lived in apartments until I was 35 and in the city until just 13 years ago. City parks are wonderful postage-stamp-sized samples of nature. I had a car. It would take me out of the city to much larger state or national parks. (Don’t have a car because you don’t need one? Good for you. But there are these things called car rental agencies that will allow you to rent one just for a single day.) “They’re crowded,” I hear. Park your butt on the ground against a tree and stare off into space or close your eyes. You’d be surprised how many people will give you a wide berth and leave you alone. As long as you’re not making a spectacle of yourself, you can even do a spell while you’re sitting there.

This is just a slice of the pie that has me grumpy. Call me old-fashioned (I do) or even a curmudgeon (I do that, too) but what I see, read, and hear makes me think laziness is at the forefront of witchcraft. And that makes me sad.