A Digression About Information Overload & The Problems Of The Future

As I write this post based on an arbitrary whim I look around and see the many sick, disheveled older people scattered around me. I’m sat in the waiting room of the maxillo facial hospital wing. I have been waiting for 1 hour at the time of writing, I have used this time to scan the multitude of news apps stored on my phone. Ive read stories about the impending tech updates, the tensions in france and the future problems my generation will have to deal with in the coming years.

Of course every single generation has their struggles and ours is no different. I’m 26 and of the generation that grew up with a sega megadrive under the tv, that remembers what we had before flatscreens, I can remember my dad having a mobile phone before sms was a thing. We are the kids that saw the first IT suites in our primary schools where we were taught how to use google as it emerged.

Since then we’ve seen fantastic strides in technical innovation and it is that very innovation that is enabling me to write this on a device more powerful then our first family computer, a beast of a machine packing a 900mhz processor, a 20gb hard drive and a 17" flat screen crt monitor. It had a cd-burner and everything!

We have all this incredible stuff that we should no doubt all be using to cure cancer and work toward higher intelligence, using the mountain of endlessly growing information that we have at our finger tips.

However the reality is one where instead of trying to solve the problems of the world we use these devices to send funny little emoticons, and pictures of our lunch to people that dont care, we watch lolcats and dogs on skateboards. Any time tradionally spent waiting around for buses and time wasted in cues is spent disconnected from the real world.

We have all this great stuff and yet it seems to have been wasted on the crappiest generation of humans, we have no war to fight in, no great depression to suffer through, we have it pretty damn easy but are we happy? Of course not.

Things are happening all the time and pretty soon we are going to have real life changing issues for example:

If you live in the uk especially southern england and you are of a similar age to me chances are you’re renting a flat or house with no real hope of buying your own. We live in a time where a “starter home” costs £300k+, theres no more land to buy and the population is slowly growing. Its a time where we are seeing the slow migration of Londoners move ever further afield to commuter towns such as woking, a big contributor to the upswing of prices in these smaller towns.

Also with France now leading the war on the IS the future feels uncertain for many young people around the world. Are we due for a big war, what countries will be affected and how many innocent people will be killed due to this complete madness.

We have seen America fall from fame as the reality distortion field has well and truly been broken with the revelations brought forward by edward and julian.

The most recent and worrying of these is the impending post antibiotic era, where drugs don’t work and people start dying of illnesses that were easily curable just five years ago.

We have all these issues and many more, but how do we combat these problems or even help at all? Is it a problem we leave future generations to solve, is much being done right now to prevent these issues. We read about the worlds problems everyday and there’s so much of it that we don’t actually give it the reverence they deserve.

All this data in our pockets is amazing however I get the feeling that it’s this overload of accessible information that’s turning us into a nation of passive, gormless, information receptacles.

Maybe it’s time you took a break from your glowing screen, back when I was a kid there was this thing called the outside.