Don’t Let Tech Drain the Life Out of Living

Photo by Denissa Devy / Unsplash

The best parts of life are messy. They refuse to follow scripts. They defy prediction. They explode past the dull constraints of data.

And Silicon Valley is a doomsday cult that keeps clawing at them, stripping away the raw, unpredictable joy of the human experience and replacing it with something smooth, sterile, and infernally dead eyed.

Streaming services generate playlists, so you don’t have to curate your own music. AI writes poems so you don’t have to wrestle with the written word. Dating apps optimize your matches to save you from fumbling through real-life conversations. Bots summarize meetings, texts and emails and soon enough our entire social lives are compressed into algorithmically-approved bullet points.

It’s an easy pitch, on the surface. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate the awkward, the uncertain, the inefficient?

But friction is where everything real happens. Struggle and uncertainty aren’t flaws — they’re the sole essence of what it means to be alive.

Creativity is exhilarating because it might fail. A joke makes you laugh because it catches you off guard. Love is profound because it isn’t guaranteed. The moment a song hits your soul at just the right moment, through a mate’s recommendation, a stranger’s car radio, or a late-night bar you wandered into…