technology
I had two thoughts on my drive in this morning. The first was that (I feel) life is more complicated than it needs to be, and the second is that it's occasionally made easier to deal with, by the same technologies that also contribute to its ever-increasing complexity.Every morning, my coffee brews automatically at six. Then I get on a computer network that would be almost impossible to describe to someone who lived a hundred years ago, and do things with it that would definitely be impossible to describe. (Imagine telling Mark Twain about "all your base are belong to us". He'd kick your ass.) There are five traffic lights and eight lane changes between my street and my school's parking lot. I walk through nine doors between my bedroom and my classroom, not including the one on my car. By the time I get here, I've been through kind of a lot. And in this respect, I'm just like everybody else. It's called the rat race.
Are we doing ourselves a disservice by being dependent on this mountain of human invention? There's no going back; even if you reverted to a stone age lifestyle, you'd wind up using ideas you didn't come up with originally, like drilling to make holes and start fires. We're all going to have ideas about what the appropriate level of technology is that we need, and those ideas are even going to change over time. It's like morals, which also change over time. As people get older, they chill out a little. This is the main reason having babies in my thirties rather than my twenties appeals to me, I'll be less crazy myself, and will therefore be able to focus on the craziness of children better.
When people age their reflexes slow down, their bodies form a comfortable pillowy layer, and they're less high-strung. (Except republicans, who habitually substitute snarling ragegasms for critical faculties. Why ask why when it feels so good to accuse your opponent of treason? If there's any justice, a new neurological disorder will attack the aging brains of Hannity-ites who made a habit of over-using their neural pathways of nonsense, blame, and false indignance. As a result, they will only be able to communicate in republican talking points and will therefore be left out to be eaten by bears.)
Eventually, I'm going to get tired of being so connected to everything. It takes a lot of effort and produces fairly little in return. Maybe it's starting already.
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