Does the development of technology make life easier or better?
I am old enough to remember a day when we had one black-and-white television with 3 commercial channels and 1 public channel. We had one telephone hanging on the wall with a long spiral cord that could stretch across the room and was always getting tangled. You wrote checks and sent them by mail to pay your bills. You balanced your checkbook manually. If you wanted to buy stocks, you had to go to the broker's office or call on the phone, and you could watch your investments in the newspaper that got delivered to your door every day. News was limited to the newspaper, radio, and television. We had the evening local and national news, and then the news at night, followed by programming that ended at midnight. To listen to your favorite music, you had to buy albums. The only way to send a note to a friend far away was to send it in the mail. There were but a few film production companies that made films, which had to be good to be played on a single cinema's screen over a matter of weeks.
Are things simpler today? Are things better? Or, are we living in an age of confusion and manipulation created by the Wild West of technology? Back in those days, I could have typed out my thoughts daily and captured them in a notebook much like I do with the blog. But who would read it? Why would I want to carry all of that around with me? Blogging has turned me into a writer, and I love my websites.
The development of Artificial Intelligence brings in a whole new dimension to the world of virtuality. Now, it is possible to ask AI to do things that would have taken me hours, if ever, to accomplish. But that also creates more information and data, which is what it is all about. Mountains of data processed by continents of processors are threatening to soak up our water and drain our electric grids. They are building it faster than they can pay for it because it appears that getting there first is all that matters.
The trick today is to get rid of paper and put it in 'the cloud'. One way to do that is to put it on an external hard drive, which is probably the safest, until it becomes defective. You will always need to update and get new hard drives to make sure your 'life' doesn't just disappear into cyber-nothingness.
Lastly, the more you do, the more you have to do to maintain it. It can spiral out of control. The trick is to delete what you don't need anymore. But, as my father used to say, you never know when you'll need it, so keep it all. Ugh.
Buried under self-created complexity
Over time, the papers grow. The photo albums get thicker. The stacks of past documents bulge the best filing system. More, and more and more and more and more until you get old and forget where you put your glasses, much less where that document you need is. It gets to be like a guy in a wheelchair having to go up a mountain. It is basically impossible. The things that you have don't matter if you can't find them, or even remember they even existed.
My parents created a great life, and I am the recipient of all of their 'stuff'. Because I moved so often, I have shed stuff many times from my life. Now, I am at that point again. But, it gets to be a very difficult thing to do. Unless I considerably lighten the load of all I have accumulated, moving around will be very difficult.