Hair of gray. Nerves of steel.
One of the clearest examples of the generation gap is the greater propensity for older generations to respond to adversity by essentially saying, “Eh, just deal with it.” In some ways, you can’t blame them, since that sort of mental resilience is what happens when “polio” or “World War” are about as common of problems in your youth as “cracked Smartphone screen” is today. Plus, there’s also the simple fact that getting older gives you an ever-increasing pile of evidence that it’s not so easy for the world to kill you.
That psychological background seems to be on display in this video from Japanese Twitter user @mk015_R, which shows a woman and a considerably older man meeting with a representative of a housing construction company. They’re presumably a father and daughter, perhaps jointly planning to build one of the multi-generational semi-duplex homes that are becoming more and more popular in Japan these days.
As part of the consultation, the agent is giving them a demonstration of his company’s earthquake-resistant construction techniques. Two chairs are placed on a moving platform that simulates an earthquake, with the one the woman is seated on showing what the tremor would feel like in an earthquake-resistant house. The father, meanwhile, is sitting on the portion that shows what the full force of the earthquake would be like…and he couldn’t care less.
As the agent twists the dial on his control box, the platform begins violently jerking back and forth, but the woman’s chair sways much more subtly. Still, the elderly man looks every bit as comfortable as she does, showing absolutely no change in expression as he involuntarily bounces back and forth across his seat.
Earthquakes are obviously a legitimate concern in seismically unstable Japan, and we do hope that the pair eventually decided to go with an earthquake-resistant design. We have no idea how the agent sold the idea to a man who can roll with the punches as well as the star of the video, though.
▼ “Do we really need walls? Couldn’t we just put up some tarps like the ones here and fight off burglers or hungry bears with our bare hands?”
You can follow Casey on Twitter, but don’t expect him to be anywhere near as cool and collected in the face of danger.
Source: Hamster Sokuho
Images: Twitter/@mk015_R