I.

I do not think anyone can convince me that the way we adopt new technology is healthy. I will illustrate my point with a simple analogy: Imagine you’re a caveperson: feeling hungry, you decide to venture out into the forest (if you’re the European kind anyway), where you find yourself a nice, round looking fruit. The fruit smells enticing, and the taste is rather pleasant. In fact, the taste is moreso addictive than it is genuinely enjoyable.

Then, excited and pleased with your new finding you take handfuls of said fruit, or maybe pouch them using your caveperson clothing and bring it over to your tribespeople. Back home everyone is encouraged by you to try said fruit, and everyone does so unquestioningly, without waiting if anything happens to you first.

Another week went by, and your friend died. Suddenly and without any prior indication. As bizarre as that was, you paid little mind to the reason of your friend’s death. Afterall cave medicine wasn’t quite advanced around your time yet. But then one by one, people would fall ill, and slowly die, suffering from a severe colic. Oh, but you ate so many things after the fruit fest! It could be anything! You think to yourself, as you try to guess the reason for the mystical ailment until you experience the colic yourself…

Even so, you might look at this analogy and think, that I am exaggerating our unquestioning approach to technology, but it is very hard to imagine a caveman doing anything like what we are doing now. Taking pride in our open mindedness and readiness to change our lives for the better, we have inadvertently accepted the role of a beta tester, a lab rat for large tech companies.

As years went by, their definition of a product ready to use has stretched wider and wider, to the point that we have in fact become their beta testers. However even when the products are produced fully ready to use, that didn’t stop us from adopting the new exotic fruit unquestioningly.

We have given permission to figure out the harms as we go.

To be completely frank, the question has never even been posed to us. (The nebulous and evil) they just kept adding more and more function to our devices, without realizing how drastically life changes around them. And by the time realization hit us, the difference in the life before and after had become so vast, no one in their sound mind would be able to renounce the newly found comforts of life of consumption.

It is a mistake to say that this happens to us for the first time. Twentieth century, especially in its later half, was filled with new inventions flooding the households and people being less and less willing to give away the new comforts of fashionable life. Fridges, electrical stoves, AC’s, microwaves, convection ovens, air fryers, toasters and other useful on one hand but not strictly necessary on the other items, have been piling up in our houses for over 7 decades now. Now, you may counter, the harm coming from digital devices is not caused by their functionality, but rather by their poor application. While there is a grain of truth to that, I think it’s important to adapt a different mindset towards evaluating technology and its strict necessity in day-to-day life.

II.

One of the important ideas that permeates our society is making things more convenient. strangely enough, there is little limit if any to where convenience must end. A thing should be as convenient as possible, lest it be forgotten like such rudimentary activities as walking, cooking, growing your own food or sewing your own clothing. Clearly, those were subpar activities, that we can now replace with a more convenient alternative of driving anywhere we want, ordering food to our doorstep or buying cheap processed meals, purchasing the most exotic fruit straight from the countries of origin and changing our wardrobe every day for a fraction of a price of making it yourself.

Let us discuss convenience: it appears to be our end all be all these days, and it’s hard to gauge whether it has always been that way. For most of the human history it seems the convenient option did not exist at all. One would have to walk to reach their destination, to work in the fields and then to process and cook the produce in order to eat, sew their own clothing or save up a considerable amount before buying an item. Entertainment was scarce and came mostly in the form of expensive toys and books (unavailable to most) or songs and dances one had to come up with first. I am of course not idolizing the feudal Europe or even its industrial offspring. I am pointing out a lot of inconveniences and hoops people used to have to jump through in order to get the things they wanted.

The context under which convenience has come into sight was a rather logical extension of market logic. Even if the markets worked by their self-proclaimed logic of the all-around best product winning the sympathy of the audience, convenience would still be the first if not the most important criterion by which said audience would evaluate the thing.

One might say that convenience is what we seek naturally, I would say convenience is what happens when our brains meet market logic.

Me and the reader may perhaps agree that the most convenient thing is not always the best. Lots of pleasurable and convenient activities do not align with our value and long-term goals. I want to go even further though, and to say that we should be wary of convenience and set not only our consumption but also our production habits in a different trajectory.

The simplest example I could come up with to vilify convenience would be food. Food used to be something one had to cook primarily at home. The rare and expensive restaurants, especially in the western world laid the primary burden of cooking on housewives, who would practically barely leave the kitchen, unless they of course could afford to have staff, at which point, they barely inconvenienced themselves with anything. The influx of food delivery services into the market and their outrageous convenience with a relatively low cost made people less intentional with what they eat in terms of nutrients, but more intentional with the cost of the food. On that note as conveniences as fast food and home delivery became dominant in the market, the simple ingredient prices soared, making cooking healthily with fresh ingredients a way more costly endeavor than it used to be. The unhealthy meals we have been ordering for years now have slowly led to worldwide health issues.

Now, is all convenience bad? Absolutely not. The convenience of having a hospital close to your home, or not having to drive your child to school, knowing they’ll be able to get there safely on their own are wonderful conveniences to have.

III.