Edited 1/3/15
I enjoy Miranda Lambert's style of music and often enjoy her lyrics, but I can't say that "Automatic" is one of my favorites. It's a good song in some respects. It's got a good melody, and the music easily invokes a feeling of nostalgia even without the lyrics, which directly invite the audience to reminisce on times past. Still, I can't count the song among my favorites because I don't agree with the song's subject or the sentiment behind it. The song talks about events in Miranda's past and compares them to her experiences in the present. She assumes that the concrete examples she gives are general enough and common enough that her audience will understand why she mentions them in the song. She assumes that her audience has had similar experiences to hers both in the past and the present, but I am one audience member who cannot say this is true. Only three years lie between our ages--I am 27, and Miranda is 30--and we are both Americans, but we still grew up in different circumstances. I cannot agree with the point she is trying to make with this song.
In "Automatic," Miranda lists things that, I assume, she misses from her childhood and teenage years--everyday things and occurrences that were accomplished only through waiting and through patience. She gives concrete examples of things that were not immediately available in the past, and she infers that these things are available instantaneously in the present. She laments the fact that these things happen automatically now in the present, which she believes causes people to take too many things for granted. She believes that we as a society cannot appreciate things that require no effort. I disagree on a few points.
I have listened to country music since I was a kid, and I am accustomed to hearing country musicians reminisce on their childhoods and wish life was as good as it used to be. I think that every generation misses something from their childhoods, so Miranda's certainly entitled to miss things, too. But she's in the same generation as me, and I just don't miss the same things about my childhood that she does, and what I do miss, I miss for different reasons. Also, I dislike nostalgia songs that reject the present in favor of a fictional past where everything was so much better, especially when that song gives examples of things that used to happen and denies that those same things could and do still happen in the present. Miranda's song ignores the fact that the gap between past and present is really not as wide as the song claims; Miranda's concrete examples draw upon cliches and formulate polar opposites between one time period and the next, but from my experience, they seem to have only 50% (or less) basis in reality.
Let me show what I mean by examining the lyrics to "Automatic" and comparing each line to my own experiences.
>>>
Quarter in a payphone
I can remember this happening up until a few years ago, when payphones were finally removed from public places. Considering how many people I know who can't afford cell phones, I wish payphones were still common. I think they would still be useful, especially in an emergency. Payphones are not something I miss personally, though. For one, they often had poor reception. In the handful of times I ever used one, I can remember when the person on the other line couldn't even hear me or other occasions when I could barely hear them. And then the paid-for time would run out in a minute or less, which was annoying. No, I usually just waited until I got home before I made phone calls on the house phone. The connection was a lot more reliable then.
I believe that the point Miranda is making is that phones are taken for granted now, but once upon a time, whenever you were in public, correct change was need to make a phone call. You also had to be patient enough to hunt down a phone, and you had to use your time on the phone wisely before the connection terminated. I can agree with Miranda's point. My experiences with payphones did make me appreciate house phones more. I can admit that, nowadays, I take my cell phone for granted. It's easy to just pick up a phone and call someone now; it's easy to forget that this wasn't always the case. The point about not taking cell phones for granted has become cliche, but that doesn't make it any less valid.
>>>
Drying laundry on the line
Here, Miranda's experiences begin to differ from mine. I never dried laundry on the line when I was a kid. My family always had clothes drying appliances. However, when I was in college, I starting hanging up my laundry, though I did so indoors. I did it to save money, either because the dryers in the dorms cost a buck per load or the dryers in various apartment complexes cost 1.25 or more per load. I have free access to a dryer again now, but I still hang-dry part of my laundry because I'm trying to cut back on carbon emissions and water usage, which are causes I began to really support in college due to exposure to lectures about conserving energy and being friendly to the environment.
So, no, I don't miss drying laundry on the line in the past because I never did it when I was a child; instead, this is something I do in the present. I have had the opposite experience here than Miranda has had. I took clothes drying for granted in the past (and, often, still do), but in the present, I have also learned to wait for at least some of my clothes to dry naturally. This is not a completely "automatic" process for me in the present, like Miranda assumes.
>>>
Watching Sun Tea in the window
I actually don't know what this line is talking about. I can guess that it just means putting a pitcher of tea in a batch of sunlight to warm it, and a Google search (an automatic aspect of modern life that I definitely know that I take for granted) confirms that I guessed right. But I never did this, either, when I was a kid, and I don't do it now. I guess Miranda mentions it in the song because such a thing as instant tea now exists. However, regular tea bags still exist, too, and they still need to be steeped in hot or cold water before drinking. Tea drinking isn't an automatic process now; it still requires patience (i. e. waiting for the water to warm and tea to steep) before arriving at the goal (i. e. a completely fused cup of tea).
>>>
Pocket watch tellin' time
I always had wristwatches when I was a kid and a teenager; I never had a pocket watch. Back then, I could simply look down at my wrist to know the time. I didn't have to wait a moment to dig the pocket watch out of my pocket before I could see the time. On the contrary, I kind of have to do that now. I no longer wear a wristwatch, so whenever I want to know what the time is, I have to dig my phone out of my pocket or out of my purse or, if I don't have my phone on me, I have to go looking for the closest clock. So finding out the time is actually a work of patience and a tiny bit of physical effort now, and when I was younger, finding out the time had been an automatic process. Again, I've had the opposite experience than what Miranda outlines in her song.
>>>
Seems like only yesterday I'd get a blank cassette
Record the country countdown 'cause I couldn't buy it yet
Okay, here's another point where Miranda and I can relate on a past experience. When I was a middle schooler and young teenager, I used to record music off the radio onto cassettes, too. As a teen, I had dozens of video tapes with episodes of TV shows that I never expected to find in stores. It was the only way I had to see the episodes sometimes; otherwise, I'd miss them and never see them again, unless the network just happened to play that particular episode in a rerun, which was an unreliable method of seeing old eps.
I continued to record things on tapes in my early twenties, even as DVD's were becoming available. For one, it was cheaper. For another, I disliked having to wait up to a year for something I liked to be released onto DVD. Now, only a few years later, networks make new episodes and new content available online quickly after their television air dates, and both music and video content are available for downloading from online services like iTunes and Amazon. So, yeah, in this regard, Miranda is right--music (and other media) are available immediately now online, and it's easy to take those services for granted instead of appreciating just how lucky we are now to have all this entertainment at our fingertips. This is another point many people have made, and it's become a bit of a cliche, but I can't deny that it isn't valid.
>>>
If we drove all the way to Dallas just to buy an Easter dress
We’d take along a Rand McNally, stand in line to pay for gas
God knows that shifting gears ain’t what it used to be
I learned to drive that 55 just like a queen, three on a tree
Nope, can't relate to these lines. While growing up, I lived in a small town of about 8,000, but that small town was immediately outside the city lines of a city of 110,000. I didn't have to "drive all the way to Dallas" just to do my shopping; all I had to do was drive about 10-20 minutes to get to the store I needed. It wasn't a big deal. I took it for granted in the past, and I take it for granted now in the present.
I still prefer to use paper maps (sometimes printed off of MapQuest, sometimes not) than GPS, so I'd be more likely to use a "Rand McNally" than not. And the cars I drove in my teens had better gear shifts that Miranda's cars, I guess.
>>>
If you had something to say
You'd write it on a piece of paper
Then you'd put a stamp on it
And they'd get it three days later
Here's another cliche complaint I've heard between the present and past--how "snail" mail isn't typically used to send personal messages like it used to be, and how this isn't necessarily a good thing. Miranda argues that, because messages are automatically sent to friends and family now, that those messages aren't appreciated as much. I beg to differ, since I think I do appreciate every electronic message I receive from friends and family. I don't need to see their handwriting in order for the words to be authentic, though I do enjoy reading handwritten words, too.
Besides, even though email is supposedly an "instantaneous" way of communicating now, I'm not so sure. Certainly, an individual email arrives in the recipient's inbox within a matter of seconds. However, I find that I often wait just as long for an electronic reply as I do for snail mail replies, sometimes a matter of days or longer. People still take time to type and formulate responses to messages. Therefore, I'd argue that textual communication still requires time and patience, which would fit Miranda's criteria in order to be properly appreciated.
>>>
Boys would call the girls
And girls would turn them down
I don't understand why these two lines are included in this song, since I'm pretty sure this still happens very often in the present.
>>>
Staying married was the only way to work your problems out
Here's another cliche complaint about how marriage supposedly used to be. But in the time that Miranda and I have both been alive, plenty of people were getting divorced when we were both kids. Plenty of couples can still get married and stay married for years without divorcing. I really don't understand the nostalgia for days when marriage was different, especially since there seems to be little evidence, from my perspective, that marriage has changed in the past three decades.
>>>
Let's pull the windows down
Windows with the cranks
Yeah, I miss hand-cranked car windows, too. But I miss them because that's one itty bit of exercise that really doesn't need to be taken away. And automatic windows also use electricity (and, therefore, create carbon emissions) to open, which is pointless and inefficient. So, I guess I'm on Miranda's side in this line; automatic power windows can be taken for granted now, but it used to require a little bit of effort and patience to roll down a window. And, if you rolled down all the windows in your car, you had to roll them down one by one and roll them back up the same way--something that a modern driver might find absurd, since all a modern driver needs to do is press a few buttons without leaving the driver's seat.
>>>
Come on let's take a picture
The kind you gotta shake
It seems odd that Miranda mentions Polaroid photos here, since I remember them being branded as a fast way of developing photos. Less patience was required to see a developed Polaroid than to see any film-camera photograph. I'd think that Polaroids would be a better symbol of things that are taken for granted, those same things Miranda is claiming she dislikes in this song.
Still, if Miranda is saying that instantaneous digital cameras are taken for granted now and can't be appreciated the way that film cameras were back in the day, then I can't completely disagree with this argument. I love my digital camera now, but part of that appreciation is due to my past experience with film cameras. I can compare the two points in time, and I know how lucky I am now to have a digital camera. I love it. I can take hundreds of photos at a time, and I can view them automatically now. Miranda argues that this is a bad thing, but I don't take my camera for granted at all. While I'd enjoy the chance to use a film camera again for artistic reasons, I don't miss the days when that was my only option. I don't miss only having 27 exposures per film or getting the photos developed on tiny 3x5 frames and having no way of getting larger versions later on because developing the photos also meant exposing the film. I love the color quality available through digital SD cards, and I love the endless numbers of photos I can take without needing to pay for more film or for more developed photos. This is definitely an aspect of modern life that, while automatic, I do not take for granted.
And, finally, I will address the refrain:
>>>
Hey, whatever happened to waitin' your turn
Miranda, apparently, doesn't need to wait for much anymore. While I agree that some things happen instantaneously now, including some of the examples she gives in this song, I still wait my turn in plenty of situations in the present. I wait in line at stoplights, in grocery store lines at the registers, in rush hour traffic, through long graduation ceremonies at various schools. I wait for packages to arrive by "snail mail" that I ordered online, and I wait just as impatiently for those packages as I did when I was younger, so that certainly hasn't changed. There are plenty of other everyday events that require waiting in my life, too.
>>>
Doing it all by hand,
I still do a lot of things by hand. I make art, I cook, I play with my cat.
>>>
'Cause when everything is handed to you
Ha. Maybe if you have money. A lot of things may be automatic now, but they still cost money. That's money I don't have, so those things may as well not be available to me at all. I can't buy all that music that is immediately available on places like iTunes. I can't afford to buy eBooks; I have to go to the library or buy used copies of books. I can't afford to do a lot of "automatic" things, so I have to be patient and wait or just deal without those things. I don't take those things for granted, not like I wish I could. My circumstances force me to wait for things and be patient.
>>>
It's only worth as much as the time put in
This is my least favorite line of the song. To assume that something immediate has no value--that time is the only way of measuring sentimental value--doesn't seem right to me. There are plenty of things in life that can be appreciated and considered priceless that need no time at all to accomplish. People attach sentimentality to a number of things for a number of reasons.
>>>
It all just seemed so good the way we had it
Back before everything became automatic
I had a good life, growing up. I can't complain about my personal circumstances, and like Miranda, there are things I miss from my childhood that I can't find anymore. But I also like my life now. Too many things in modern life are not automatic, and I've already listed a few of those things. Patience is still an important key of life, and with patience, it is possible to develop an appreciation for aspects of life that we still don't get automatically. But being required to wait for something is not the only way in which something can be appreciated. Automatic doesn't equate to bad. There are plenty of everyday things in my life that I appreciate even if I can access them without effort.
Of course, I don't entirely dislike or disagree with Miranda Lambert's "Automatic." Though I don't agree with some of the concrete examples she gives, and I don't agree that the world of our childhoods was better or even the polar opposite of the present, I can agree that there are some aspects of modern life that I should appreciate more than I do. The song also has a moral lesson. The moral is not to take things for granted, to remember to slow down and appreciate what I have. I can agree with that.
I enjoy Miranda Lambert's style of music and often enjoy her lyrics, but I can't say that "Automatic" is one of my favorites. It's a good song in some respects. It's got a good melody, and the music easily invokes a feeling of nostalgia even without the lyrics, which directly invite the audience to reminisce on times past. Still, I can't count the song among my favorites because I don't agree with the song's subject or the sentiment behind it. The song talks about events in Miranda's past and compares them to her experiences in the present. She assumes that the concrete examples she gives are general enough and common enough that her audience will understand why she mentions them in the song. She assumes that her audience has had similar experiences to hers both in the past and the present, but I am one audience member who cannot say this is true. Only three years lie between our ages--I am 27, and Miranda is 30--and we are both Americans, but we still grew up in different circumstances. I cannot agree with the point she is trying to make with this song.
In "Automatic," Miranda lists things that, I assume, she misses from her childhood and teenage years--everyday things and occurrences that were accomplished only through waiting and through patience. She gives concrete examples of things that were not immediately available in the past, and she infers that these things are available instantaneously in the present. She laments the fact that these things happen automatically now in the present, which she believes causes people to take too many things for granted. She believes that we as a society cannot appreciate things that require no effort. I disagree on a few points.
I have listened to country music since I was a kid, and I am accustomed to hearing country musicians reminisce on their childhoods and wish life was as good as it used to be. I think that every generation misses something from their childhoods, so Miranda's certainly entitled to miss things, too. But she's in the same generation as me, and I just don't miss the same things about my childhood that she does, and what I do miss, I miss for different reasons. Also, I dislike nostalgia songs that reject the present in favor of a fictional past where everything was so much better, especially when that song gives examples of things that used to happen and denies that those same things could and do still happen in the present. Miranda's song ignores the fact that the gap between past and present is really not as wide as the song claims; Miranda's concrete examples draw upon cliches and formulate polar opposites between one time period and the next, but from my experience, they seem to have only 50% (or less) basis in reality.
Let me show what I mean by examining the lyrics to "Automatic" and comparing each line to my own experiences.
>>>
Quarter in a payphone
I can remember this happening up until a few years ago, when payphones were finally removed from public places. Considering how many people I know who can't afford cell phones, I wish payphones were still common. I think they would still be useful, especially in an emergency. Payphones are not something I miss personally, though. For one, they often had poor reception. In the handful of times I ever used one, I can remember when the person on the other line couldn't even hear me or other occasions when I could barely hear them. And then the paid-for time would run out in a minute or less, which was annoying. No, I usually just waited until I got home before I made phone calls on the house phone. The connection was a lot more reliable then.
I believe that the point Miranda is making is that phones are taken for granted now, but once upon a time, whenever you were in public, correct change was need to make a phone call. You also had to be patient enough to hunt down a phone, and you had to use your time on the phone wisely before the connection terminated. I can agree with Miranda's point. My experiences with payphones did make me appreciate house phones more. I can admit that, nowadays, I take my cell phone for granted. It's easy to just pick up a phone and call someone now; it's easy to forget that this wasn't always the case. The point about not taking cell phones for granted has become cliche, but that doesn't make it any less valid.
>>>
Drying laundry on the line
Here, Miranda's experiences begin to differ from mine. I never dried laundry on the line when I was a kid. My family always had clothes drying appliances. However, when I was in college, I starting hanging up my laundry, though I did so indoors. I did it to save money, either because the dryers in the dorms cost a buck per load or the dryers in various apartment complexes cost 1.25 or more per load. I have free access to a dryer again now, but I still hang-dry part of my laundry because I'm trying to cut back on carbon emissions and water usage, which are causes I began to really support in college due to exposure to lectures about conserving energy and being friendly to the environment.
So, no, I don't miss drying laundry on the line in the past because I never did it when I was a child; instead, this is something I do in the present. I have had the opposite experience here than Miranda has had. I took clothes drying for granted in the past (and, often, still do), but in the present, I have also learned to wait for at least some of my clothes to dry naturally. This is not a completely "automatic" process for me in the present, like Miranda assumes.
>>>
Watching Sun Tea in the window
I actually don't know what this line is talking about. I can guess that it just means putting a pitcher of tea in a batch of sunlight to warm it, and a Google search (an automatic aspect of modern life that I definitely know that I take for granted) confirms that I guessed right. But I never did this, either, when I was a kid, and I don't do it now. I guess Miranda mentions it in the song because such a thing as instant tea now exists. However, regular tea bags still exist, too, and they still need to be steeped in hot or cold water before drinking. Tea drinking isn't an automatic process now; it still requires patience (i. e. waiting for the water to warm and tea to steep) before arriving at the goal (i. e. a completely fused cup of tea).
>>>
Pocket watch tellin' time
I always had wristwatches when I was a kid and a teenager; I never had a pocket watch. Back then, I could simply look down at my wrist to know the time. I didn't have to wait a moment to dig the pocket watch out of my pocket before I could see the time. On the contrary, I kind of have to do that now. I no longer wear a wristwatch, so whenever I want to know what the time is, I have to dig my phone out of my pocket or out of my purse or, if I don't have my phone on me, I have to go looking for the closest clock. So finding out the time is actually a work of patience and a tiny bit of physical effort now, and when I was younger, finding out the time had been an automatic process. Again, I've had the opposite experience than what Miranda outlines in her song.
>>>
Seems like only yesterday I'd get a blank cassette
Record the country countdown 'cause I couldn't buy it yet
Okay, here's another point where Miranda and I can relate on a past experience. When I was a middle schooler and young teenager, I used to record music off the radio onto cassettes, too. As a teen, I had dozens of video tapes with episodes of TV shows that I never expected to find in stores. It was the only way I had to see the episodes sometimes; otherwise, I'd miss them and never see them again, unless the network just happened to play that particular episode in a rerun, which was an unreliable method of seeing old eps.
I continued to record things on tapes in my early twenties, even as DVD's were becoming available. For one, it was cheaper. For another, I disliked having to wait up to a year for something I liked to be released onto DVD. Now, only a few years later, networks make new episodes and new content available online quickly after their television air dates, and both music and video content are available for downloading from online services like iTunes and Amazon. So, yeah, in this regard, Miranda is right--music (and other media) are available immediately now online, and it's easy to take those services for granted instead of appreciating just how lucky we are now to have all this entertainment at our fingertips. This is another point many people have made, and it's become a bit of a cliche, but I can't deny that it isn't valid.
>>>
If we drove all the way to Dallas just to buy an Easter dress
We’d take along a Rand McNally, stand in line to pay for gas
God knows that shifting gears ain’t what it used to be
I learned to drive that 55 just like a queen, three on a tree
Nope, can't relate to these lines. While growing up, I lived in a small town of about 8,000, but that small town was immediately outside the city lines of a city of 110,000. I didn't have to "drive all the way to Dallas" just to do my shopping; all I had to do was drive about 10-20 minutes to get to the store I needed. It wasn't a big deal. I took it for granted in the past, and I take it for granted now in the present.
I still prefer to use paper maps (sometimes printed off of MapQuest, sometimes not) than GPS, so I'd be more likely to use a "Rand McNally" than not. And the cars I drove in my teens had better gear shifts that Miranda's cars, I guess.
>>>
If you had something to say
You'd write it on a piece of paper
Then you'd put a stamp on it
And they'd get it three days later
Here's another cliche complaint I've heard between the present and past--how "snail" mail isn't typically used to send personal messages like it used to be, and how this isn't necessarily a good thing. Miranda argues that, because messages are automatically sent to friends and family now, that those messages aren't appreciated as much. I beg to differ, since I think I do appreciate every electronic message I receive from friends and family. I don't need to see their handwriting in order for the words to be authentic, though I do enjoy reading handwritten words, too.
Besides, even though email is supposedly an "instantaneous" way of communicating now, I'm not so sure. Certainly, an individual email arrives in the recipient's inbox within a matter of seconds. However, I find that I often wait just as long for an electronic reply as I do for snail mail replies, sometimes a matter of days or longer. People still take time to type and formulate responses to messages. Therefore, I'd argue that textual communication still requires time and patience, which would fit Miranda's criteria in order to be properly appreciated.
>>>
Boys would call the girls
And girls would turn them down
I don't understand why these two lines are included in this song, since I'm pretty sure this still happens very often in the present.
>>>
Staying married was the only way to work your problems out
Here's another cliche complaint about how marriage supposedly used to be. But in the time that Miranda and I have both been alive, plenty of people were getting divorced when we were both kids. Plenty of couples can still get married and stay married for years without divorcing. I really don't understand the nostalgia for days when marriage was different, especially since there seems to be little evidence, from my perspective, that marriage has changed in the past three decades.
>>>
Let's pull the windows down
Windows with the cranks
Yeah, I miss hand-cranked car windows, too. But I miss them because that's one itty bit of exercise that really doesn't need to be taken away. And automatic windows also use electricity (and, therefore, create carbon emissions) to open, which is pointless and inefficient. So, I guess I'm on Miranda's side in this line; automatic power windows can be taken for granted now, but it used to require a little bit of effort and patience to roll down a window. And, if you rolled down all the windows in your car, you had to roll them down one by one and roll them back up the same way--something that a modern driver might find absurd, since all a modern driver needs to do is press a few buttons without leaving the driver's seat.
>>>
Come on let's take a picture
The kind you gotta shake
It seems odd that Miranda mentions Polaroid photos here, since I remember them being branded as a fast way of developing photos. Less patience was required to see a developed Polaroid than to see any film-camera photograph. I'd think that Polaroids would be a better symbol of things that are taken for granted, those same things Miranda is claiming she dislikes in this song.
Still, if Miranda is saying that instantaneous digital cameras are taken for granted now and can't be appreciated the way that film cameras were back in the day, then I can't completely disagree with this argument. I love my digital camera now, but part of that appreciation is due to my past experience with film cameras. I can compare the two points in time, and I know how lucky I am now to have a digital camera. I love it. I can take hundreds of photos at a time, and I can view them automatically now. Miranda argues that this is a bad thing, but I don't take my camera for granted at all. While I'd enjoy the chance to use a film camera again for artistic reasons, I don't miss the days when that was my only option. I don't miss only having 27 exposures per film or getting the photos developed on tiny 3x5 frames and having no way of getting larger versions later on because developing the photos also meant exposing the film. I love the color quality available through digital SD cards, and I love the endless numbers of photos I can take without needing to pay for more film or for more developed photos. This is definitely an aspect of modern life that, while automatic, I do not take for granted.
And, finally, I will address the refrain:
>>>
Hey, whatever happened to waitin' your turn
Miranda, apparently, doesn't need to wait for much anymore. While I agree that some things happen instantaneously now, including some of the examples she gives in this song, I still wait my turn in plenty of situations in the present. I wait in line at stoplights, in grocery store lines at the registers, in rush hour traffic, through long graduation ceremonies at various schools. I wait for packages to arrive by "snail mail" that I ordered online, and I wait just as impatiently for those packages as I did when I was younger, so that certainly hasn't changed. There are plenty of other everyday events that require waiting in my life, too.
>>>
Doing it all by hand,
I still do a lot of things by hand. I make art, I cook, I play with my cat.
>>>
'Cause when everything is handed to you
Ha. Maybe if you have money. A lot of things may be automatic now, but they still cost money. That's money I don't have, so those things may as well not be available to me at all. I can't buy all that music that is immediately available on places like iTunes. I can't afford to buy eBooks; I have to go to the library or buy used copies of books. I can't afford to do a lot of "automatic" things, so I have to be patient and wait or just deal without those things. I don't take those things for granted, not like I wish I could. My circumstances force me to wait for things and be patient.
>>>
It's only worth as much as the time put in
This is my least favorite line of the song. To assume that something immediate has no value--that time is the only way of measuring sentimental value--doesn't seem right to me. There are plenty of things in life that can be appreciated and considered priceless that need no time at all to accomplish. People attach sentimentality to a number of things for a number of reasons.
>>>
It all just seemed so good the way we had it
Back before everything became automatic
I had a good life, growing up. I can't complain about my personal circumstances, and like Miranda, there are things I miss from my childhood that I can't find anymore. But I also like my life now. Too many things in modern life are not automatic, and I've already listed a few of those things. Patience is still an important key of life, and with patience, it is possible to develop an appreciation for aspects of life that we still don't get automatically. But being required to wait for something is not the only way in which something can be appreciated. Automatic doesn't equate to bad. There are plenty of everyday things in my life that I appreciate even if I can access them without effort.
Of course, I don't entirely dislike or disagree with Miranda Lambert's "Automatic." Though I don't agree with some of the concrete examples she gives, and I don't agree that the world of our childhoods was better or even the polar opposite of the present, I can agree that there are some aspects of modern life that I should appreciate more than I do. The song also has a moral lesson. The moral is not to take things for granted, to remember to slow down and appreciate what I have. I can agree with that.
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