That quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” is generally attributed to Mark Twain. He’s had more stuff attributed and misattributed to him than Yogi Berra, as well as plenty more pithy stuff he uttered and scribbled that never made it into everyday discourse. I’ll bet even his laundry lists were Rosetta Stones of wit and wisdom.

So I got to thinking about the “kids these days” discussions that permeate the greybeard portions of the internet. These appear far away from the “OK boomer” environs. These twains never meet, except to yell at each other.

People of a certain age often remark that the younger set don’t like to get their hands dirty as much as the generations that preceded them. It’s a fair comment, generally. I have two adult-ish children, and while they’re willing to hold their nose occasionally and help dad bang on our house, they really aren’t into the manual arts like I was at their age. But does that really mean that my generation is hands on, and they’re all hands off? I’m not so sure.

Here’s an example. I made these, because I can. They’re Adirondack chairs:

There are some clues on display in the picture. The various colors of the pieces of wood betray their pedigree. They’re all the same kind of lumberyard pine. The pieces are different colors because they’re made out of little scraps of this and that I had hanging around the workshop. Sunlight has darkened some pieces of them noticeably.

There is a real fetish for making furniture and other items out of wood pallets nowadays. The internet is full of videos about how to this and you can do that to arrive at objets de meh made from pallets. I’ve always found them to be sorta silly. Pallet lumber is mostly pretty nasty, and lumberyard pine is pretty cheap and not full of staples and lord knows what that spilled from the barrels that the pallets once carried. So people my age make Adirondack chairs from scrap lumber and younger folks make coffee tables out of pallets, and history rhymes a bit. Hey, pallet projects are no sillier than the hippie coffee tables made from cable spools that were popular in apartments in the sixties and seventies, or bookshelves made from planks and concrete blocks.

I’ve often encouraged everyone, regardless of age, to take an interest in building or repairing the house they live in. This mostly falls on deaf ears with people much younger than me. To them a house is like an immutable, permanent, plastic unit that they should be able to buy on a Starbucks salary. The idea that maintaining one would be kind of gratifying, interesting, and borderline fun sounds strange to their ears. So instead of This Old House, you get Dexter’s laboratory. This is sort of project that’s popular on these here intertunnels with people whose fresh sale date isn’t bearing down on them so hard:

For just $2, convert any existing wired doorbell into a smart doorbell; using ESPHome and Home Assistant

Integrating your doorbell into your smart home is a very logical step to take. Making your doorbell smart, allows you to do cool things with it, for example:

Turn the chime/bell off after a specific time, when the kids or you went to bed. Also, turn it on again in the morning.
Send out push notifications to your phone/tv/watch/smart speaker, on the doorbell button push.
Take a snapshot from a front door camera, on the doorbell button push.
Stream your front door camera to your TV, on the doorbell button push.
Ring the doorbell continuously in case of an emergency (e.g., smoke detectors triggered).

I’ve done small electronic projects in my yute. None of the instructions in the tutorial is obscure to me. I just don’t give a shiny shite about making my doorbell do any of those things. I’ll go further, and testify without fear of contradiction that if my doorbell did those things, I’d publish a tutorial on how to make it stop doing those things. You know, like this:

But I also subscribe to the worldview of different strokes for different folks. Frenck wanted to fuss around with his doorbell, and I wanted to make some chairs my wife and I can sit on in the afternoon. The urge to tinker, and make something out of materials at hand, is nearly universal. That’s history rhyming, or chiming, or something.

There is danger here, though. Modify things too much, and it’s easy to lose sight of what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. Here’s a picture of my front porch:

It has a doorbell that chimes to alert people inside the house that someone is at the door. I installed it, and it works. But I also have two chairs that allow us to sit next to the doorbell, and greet people before they even get a chance to press it. And the chairs also work fine, even when the power goes out.

So I acknowledge that history rhymes constantly, although most people are too hidebound to notice when it does. This leads to kids these days diatribes or OK boomer derogations at the drop of a hat. But I’d also be remiss, and a disappointment to my generation, if I didn’t point out that the rhyming these days usually adds up to a really shitty poem. With push notifications.