One day, I will tell my grandkids what the world was like without technology and they will drop their jaws in awe. There was a time when people didn’t try to capture experiences with their cell phones, record them on Instagram and Vine, instead of actually enjoying them. There was a time where people used to call each other on their home phones, asking for little Jimmy to come over and play instead of texting them until their fingers bled.
There was a time where we had to wait for the CD of our favorite artist to come out, and play it on our clunky walkman instead of illegally downloading mp3 files and shoving small earphones in our head. There was a time when ten year olds were more concerned with the foursquare game they had at recess rather than when they were going to get their first iPhone. “Cyberbullying” was hardly a term when we were younger, something developed by the tech-savvy generation. There was a time when we all went to bed fairly early, because there was no fluorescent light from our laptops. There was a time when we had to wait for a movie to come out to theaters, making an event out of it instead of pirating it online. There was a time when we cared more about our appearances than our Facebook profile pictures. There was a time when people did not get paid for releasing a “How to put on makeup” video on Youtube.
What a horrible world, they might say. How awful.
But is it really?
Sure, technological advances have helped the world immensely. We hear stories about social media reuniting the kidnapped, the estranged, the distant family. We see trending topics on twitter that help young children with a terminal illness to fulfill a wish: going to Disney World or meeting a celebrity. Through cell phones and messaging, we can keep in touch with people around the world who may need extra assistance. We can follow up on mission trips and volunteer work, document the progress and make sure everything running smoothly. As a whole, we can do things more quickly and efficiently. There’s no doubt about that.
Yet sadly, we have created a world of immediate satisfaction. Everything is at our fingertips. If we don’t have a shortcut or a quicker way of doing something, it’s not worth it. We are more concerned with capturing the experience rather than EXPERIENCING the experience. It’s all about the click, record and update status button, not the actual events we participate in.
We have essentially forgotten how to live for ourselves.
Jeremy Glass put it bluntly in his book We Can’t Get Lost Anymore: “We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in the ocean, because there’s no service on the beach and adventures aren’t real unless they’re on Instagram. Technology has doomed the spontaneity of adventure and we’re helping destroy it every time we Google, check-in, and hashtag.”
So post your accomplishments on your profile. Add a picture or two of your child’s first birthday. Tweet about something great that happened to you today. Call your mom or dad to say hi. But don’t forget to enjoy the real world that you live in, not just the digitally created one.