Lazy In The Driving Seat
Our relationship to technology is becoming unhealthy, and as it becomes ever more pervasive the situation doesn’t look to be improving much.
People should be encouraged to develop skills they lack, and to overcome obstacles that they find in their way. They need to be given the skills to problem solve — they do not need to be met at every turn with a way to outsource all their problems.
Expect the best and prepare for the worst may sound like a depressing notion to some, but it talks of a preparedness that a lot of people are seemingly setting aside more and more. Watch the tensions rise to the surface when a situation like a hurricane puts strain on the normal mode of operation and smashes the comfort zone. People have to scramble — or they find themselves unable to do even that.
Not solving problems on a daily basis, and operating on a kind of autopilot means your ability to spin up your thinking mechanisms is lessened, or at least drastically slowed down. Who wants that? Who wants to be rendered inoperable by a mere bump in the road?
What are you still able to do in a power cut? Do you have any resources you can draw on in a bad weather situation? Can you change a tire? Can you feed yourself without a supermarket having stocked shelves? Can you change a bulb?
The last hurricane that hit Florida tested all of the weak points in my life and found them wanting. The ability to run up the stairs and not be out of breath is not that dissimilar to being able to weather a storm and bounce back with minimal effort to your normal routine. It has to be driven by you though.
Do people wonder about atrophied skills? About slowly erased life skills? About dependency on technology for things that could easily be handled with a little bit of elbow grease. I am not sure if elbow grease is a valuable commodity anymore. The desire to hack and shortcut everything leads to a culture where people expect there to be cheat codes on everything.
Complaining about the price of your Netflix subscription going up should be directed at the people who share their password. Books not selling? Look to the illegal downloaders who made it OK to steal books.
I went through my honeymoon period with Alexa and Google Voice Assistant, but I don’t think I am going to get married to them or the idea of them. Any technology should put the human front and center; any technology should amplify rather than deaden the humanity.
From early adopter to Luddite? Not exactly. Just valuing more humanity in the mix.
