A beautiful promise of Technology was equality and prosperity. Democratization of opportunities, where everyone has a chance to pursue a better life, where economic or physical limitations can be transcended. A lofty ideal which is apparently quite achievable. Right?
Maybe not.
Statistics seem to be telling a strangely contradictory story. The gap between the rich and poor countries is increasing as is the Gini index; the gap between the rich and the poor in a particular country. Unprecedented access to information should be pushing education levels higher, but many national tests measuring scholastic aptitudes show falling scores all across the board. The Internet is making unlikely millionaires and billionaires out of people who would never have had a chance before, but is financial freedom the only necessary freedom? For one valuable business on the internet, there are billions of sub-standard ones from people who want to ride the wave to make a quick buck. Technology is precluding the need for higher education just because it has made financial independence easier. That seems like a good thing, but is it? First, not all college drop-out, digital entrepreneurs become billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel. Second, technology is not really making us more intelligent. Quite the contrary.
We’ll see why.
Coveted work is now defined by inputs received by and the direction provided by technology. That is rational, but the underlying trouble is that people do not have vocations, but are workers; cogs in a giant machinery. This is evident, among other cases, in the run-of-the-mill production of a gazillion coders and software engineers, akin to line -workers in the previous industrial era. Inclination and aptitude rarely match up with vocation, and everyone is throughly dispensable.
Technology was supposed to liberate us from the drudgery of work, but has it?
All around us there is a mad rush to an ‘elusive’ top of the socio-economic ladder. One with magical, ever growing rungs. It is the only place everyone seems to be huffing towards, sweaty and red faced! Upward social mobility seems to have become the sole impetus of life.
It is the only stimulus, the only inspiration, the singular motivation.
Why not, you may ask? We all want to be more prosperous, don’t we? Of course, but how many of us are working at jobs that we honestly do not enjoy, only to pay up the mortgage for the new house or the new car? This ailment of trudging away at work which fails to excite and fulfil has taken epidemic proportions. If you were not getting paid for the job, would you still have loved to do it? No kidding. You work only to assure a place for yourself in this race. If the race is only toward a higher socio-economic plane, it still seems to be only a race of survival.
Sophisticated survival, but survival nonetheless.Where is the liberty, in it? Where is the fulfilment?
If life was to be defined only by what one earns, if the ideological underpinning of life was only economic determinism, then all high-paying jobs should have been fulfilling. Sadly, more often than not, work itself is boring and robotic. Expensive vacations and constantly advancing gadgets move is as distractions and escapes. First the stress of an ever multiplying work load and a constant time crunch. Then, as if to overcompensate for having lost something valuable, the costly vacation and the luxurious toys. Well that is life, and we love it, you may quip. Everyone is doing it!
Are you sure?
Also, what do the majority of us do for leisure? We play video games, are lost in the wonders of the latest mobile applications, the Twitters, the Facebooks and the latest Netflix originals. T.V. programs which the critics have been rating as ‘low’ on intelligence. There are so many enticing, addictive ways to fill time now! Try opening up Facebook or Twitter, a minute might magically morph into hours. Who has the time or the patience to read a winding, rambling book now when one is already so busy reading micro- blogs on Twitter? They appear to be intellectually engaging, but with attention spans as small as the micro-blogs themselves, any feeling of intellectual fulfilment is actually illusory. The world has never been more obese, with digital gymnasiums and their enticing workouts becoming everyone’s favourite haunt. Fewer people are going out to give votes, even though party wars are being fought and won, on Twitter and Facebook .
Is technology driving us towards excellence?
Take notice of this, and think about it, keenly. We, as the technology obsessed generation have nothing of importance to think about. Nothing of actual consequence. The de-personalization of work and the flood of technological ‘escapes’ is leading to a strange cultural, moral decline. This may not be too apparent, lost as we are in the distractions and diversions of a super-engaged life. Maybe this unrelenting mental engagement with technology, intellectual engagement to stretch it, is keeping us from exploring other aspects of life. It seems as if we are being constantly encouraged to keep ourselves high on the sensory ecstasies of technological drugs. So that we might never come down, get sober enough to give attention to other aspects of our existence.
There are unlimited servings of ever-so-entertaining ‘fiction’ so that we have no time nor inclination for ‘reality’.
Listen, our lifestyles are becoming sophisticated but are our lives attaining refinement too?
Lifestyle is not life.
You may realize that too, and acutely. Our successes today are measured by the efficiency of machinery available to us, and not by any real self improvement! We may have numbed ourselves with technological excesses, but keeping busy does not necessarily mean being fulfilled and satisfied.
Are we as a civilization becoming more refined?
What does the totem of our culture stand for?
What are we eventually aspiring for? What is the highest goal of our endeavours?
How would we define ourselves?
A rich generation which has unlimited access to a deluge of sense pleasures. That might just be succinct and accurate. Our only happiness, very fleeting, comes from buying more and consuming more.
Eventually though, we will all acutely recognize that a comfortable lifestyle does not mean a life devoid of suffering. It does not ensure happiness. Many have had this realization because it is only a natural outcome. One which will dawn on our generation sooner than later. Technology cannot take away the pain of un-actualised potential, the grief of unfulfilled creative impulses. It cannot fill the void of existential angst, the hollowness of a meaningless, robotic life. It cannot make solid the flimsy groundlessness of a life with no purpose. No purpose higher than to survive comfortably.
Look deeply and it seems that technology has put a ceiling on the ‘height’ of human endeavour. We expect too little from life and from ourselves, only as much as this external technology will allow. Really, we have put the ‘highest human aspiration’ in limiting shackles. Self imposed shackles of diminished meaning and diminished fulfilment. A diminished existence.Why? Is there more, you could ask.
Maybe. Maybe there is much more than what Technology can give and make us.