IT'S NEVER ENOUGH......

When I was a teenager there was no way to know where anyone was. There were only two ways of knowing (for sure)...one was if they were actually standing next to you....and the other is if you called them on the phone at their house and they picked up the phone. That was it! In the absence of those two scenarios there was no way of contacting anyone...not your mom, your dad, your bff, your girlfriend, etc.. Just Imagine a world so uncivilized. Well, it actually wasn’t uncivilized at all...quite the contrary. But, it seems completely unacceptable by today’s standards. There is almost a panic when people in your circle cannot be reached instantaneously. We need to be able to reach people NOW! Just a few years ago parents had no way of knowing where their 10 year old kid was as he was traversing the streets on his or her bicycle, serpentine, as the sun went down on a busy weekday. I don’t remember anyone being anxious about that...certainly not me. We have become conditioned to be desperate for constant information about where everyone is.  Now--you can get a hold of anyone, anytime, anywhere. Your cousin could be riding an elephant in Cairo and you could likely have a real time conversation with them from Disneyland, or your car, wherever. There is almost no way to go “off the grid”.

If you asked people today, especially adolescents, to live a life without smartphones...there might be a collective stampede for the nearest bridge. It wouldn’t go over well at all....it is quite possible that no one would see the need to get out of bed in the morning, ever again...such would be the widespread shock and melancholy caused by a world without smart phones. Now, imagine our culture (here) in America in about 20 years....there will certainly be a gadget or some form of technology that will seem indispensable to human existence. Who knows what it might be....but it’s absence might prevent you from feeling happy, or complete. So, with just the technology we have today...a technology that dwarfs what I had as a child and young adult.....a person living twenty years from now might feel severely handicapped in his ability to carry out a convenient and satisfying life.

What am I saying? Well, the larger observation is that it is quite clear that as technology and progress continue their exponential and meteoric climb.....our standards for what determines ”minimal existence” change. The bar gets reset....at a freakishly fast pace. Just a couple hundred years ago our Founding Fathers were signing the Declaration of Independence on a hot July day in a room with no air conditioning, wearing clothes that were not at all practical or comfortable by today’s standards. They likely walked, or rode a horse drawn carriage to the place where they would sign that Declaration. They would go back home to a house with no refrigeration, and no light other than candlelight when the sun went down over the horizon. No televisions, of course, so nighttime was either spent reading by candlelight or something similarly as sedentary. Unless you had live music played in your home, you had no music at all....there were no recording devices. Imagine the effort that went into preparing a meal--it is beyond the comprehension of anyone living in this place and this time.

I can imagine a day not too far off, perhaps, when the same people who have smart phones now have their own individual air shuttles that allow them to personally fly themselves all over the place....just a push of a button and they can be whisked off to another part of the city or state, to the backyard of their friend’s house, etc.. You would just set your navigation and the computerization would do the rest....NOW, imagine a day when a person had plans to get in their personalized space traveler, complete with Gugliophonic sound, and a mini bar, and the power button to the space traveler would not work....I could imagine a person getting outraged by that inconvenience.....even a brief tantrum over the fact that their personalized space traveler wouldn’t start up as it always does. We do this now when our computers don’t function the way we think they should, or if they ”freeze up”. For some of us, it can ruin our days. Imagine if Thomas Jefferson had a personal computer and imagine him losing his patience over a temporary malfunction...Jefferson might not have had enough time to be haggling over a personal computer. He was arguably the finest Agronomer of his time, inventing many breakthrough farming devices and practices. Jefferson got his law degree and practiced law for nearly two decades. Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence. He also found the time to Found and design the University of Virginia. He was an architect who spent 40 years designing and building his home at Monticello. And, he also spent 8 years as the First Secretary of State under George Washington, 4 years as Vice President, and another 8 years as President of the United States of America. Jefferson was also the first foreign diplomat. This is just a partial list of Jefferson’s accomplishments and activities. If he had only had a smartphone.

We get softer and softer and our demands for what we define as a “minimal” existence get greater and greater. What it takes for us to be content is constantly eluding us. Yet, we have every reason to believe that previous generations were no less happy, perhaps even more content, than we are today...with all of our rejuvenating creams and our flat screens and our XBoxes, and botoxes.

We don’t grow happier when we get more things.....I think virtually every study will bear this out....we do, however, become less resourceful, less tolerant, less hearty, more impatient, more demanding, more dependent, more entitled, and less able to live in the moment. Our ability to focus is compromised by our increasingly shorter attention spans and need for yet ever greater speed and excitement. Try finding more than a handful of movies that don’t have car chases, space ship explosions, galactic battles, or gun fights. The films that are made for “millennials” virtually all have this mass marketing component.

We have everything at our literal fingertips these days...and yet I am sure it will never be enough. We will always be redefining our expectations for existential comfort. The things that really bring happiness can’t be found with fingertips or technology....technology will never make a life more meaningful...it can make it more comfortable and convenient....it can even create opportunity...but the search for meaning is a journey that cannot be hastened by downloads or Apps. We are entitled to nothing, and yet essentially nothing meaningful can ever be taken away from us.

50 years ago imagine the total thrill of knowing that you could have pizza delivered to your front door, in less than an hour. That thrill is long gone. We, as a civilization, will never be satisfied.

Food for Thought.....