Sometimes you can feel the weight of history shifting beneath your feet.

We put men on the moon. We split the atom. We went from twisting a dial to tune a black-and-white TV to streaming movies to your own sunglasses. Every so often, humanity takes another step that quietly changes how life works.

And now, I’ve witnessed another.

The things I grew up with – they demanded work. Commitment. You couldn’t just sit back and enjoy the experience, you had to earn it. There was setup involved. Effort. You blew into that thing until your cheeks hurt, and if you wanted to do it again, you had to start all over. It was a whole ordeal.

Then civilisation moved on. We went from analogue to digital. From manual to automatic. From breathless gasping to effortless, automatic glory.

This week, for his birthday, mcpheeJnr got a whoopie cushion.
A self-inflating whoopie cushion.

And yeah, after a bit of a deep dive, I now know they’ve been around since the 90s. For more than three decades people have had this technological marvel – and I’ve been stumbling along in ignorance, still blowing into bits of rubber like a caveman.