One of the great promises of technology always has been to allow the buyer to accomplish much more in a shorter amount of time, and to elevate “work” to more efficient standards.
Another was that technology would allow the worker to spend more time at leisure while with their families because the tech was expected to decrease necessary work hours. But the promise of the 30-hour work week has turned into a thirty-hour workday.
It was never intended to be the way it is today, but the competitive nature of the human animal took over.
When businesspeople started toting around the first bag-phones and found it provided a competitive advantage, the die was cast. They would all have one in short order … and then the phones became smaller and offered more … and then everyone had one.
To paraphrase an advertising campaign from decades ago, you could “reach and touch someone” from anywhere, and just say “Hi”, or reach out and ruin their day. Today, smartphones are ubiquitous, and we don’t want to be anywhere without them.
There are lots of upsides and downsides that have come with the cellphone takeover, but they also allow some nameless and faceless telemarketer to interrupt your anniversary celebration because they “must speak with you today about you the warranty on your car”. The technology has continued to advance, too, and now we have little, teeny highly functional computers that easily fit in pocket or purse.
They run for a couple of days on a single charge and allow instant distraction while siphoning time away from genuine human interaction with those around us. Computing and the internet puts a world of information with us at all times, but the intent was to unshackle us from our desks and offices.
We are not chained to our desk, but instead we now have an electronic tether.
Mail became email, memos became text messages, and you’re going to get them 24 hours per day, every day for the rest of your life. The tech, unfortunately, is perverted to the point that it’s used for “Social Media” (which I submit should be named “anti-social media”), a ridiculous and harmful amount of porn, and either baby monkey videos or curvy dancing women trying to sell us collapsible garden hoses or tools.
Don’t get me wrong, all the tech can be used for good, and it is. What’s wrong is human interaction that we need to learn to finesse. We have the tech, but we don’t have the emotional intelligence and societal changes sufficient to deal with it on a daily basis.
The best belly laughs I’ve had in the past year were all in person. You know, face to face, when I was immersed in the moment and not multitasking with some device. When the printing press was invented, the first thing printed was The Bible. The second, porn.
One of the first images sent across the internet was Miss October.
Society and human nature have yet to catch up with the tech that has temporarily morphed into a time thief, and it’s time we learned to savor the little slivers of time we have when we are not electronically bound to others. The genius thing to do is turn the smart phone off, take the ear phones off, turn off the smart watch, and leave it out of reach.
A couple of hours here, and a couple of hours there won’t make a measurable difference in your career, but it will immeasurably improve your life because you can stop all this tech from stealing moments from you. You’ll be happier, more interesting and may even preserve your tenuous grasp on sanity.
We will get this right. The question is when.
