Is Technology Ruining Our Lives?

The problem

For a long time, I had a weird longing for the past where technology wasn't playing such an important role in our lives.

I have been longing for those moments when people were simply reading their newspapers, drinking a coffee outside and looking at the people passing by instead of scrolling their phones constantly.

Why I call it a weird longing is because my generation barely witnessed it, maybe only when I was a kid.

For a long time, I felt that the secret to a more peaceful life, was to remove the technology from our lives and go back to living in the wild. Maybe not that dramatic, but you get the idea!

But only until recently, I came to the understanding that even by removing technology and going 50-100 years back, to that romantic life in my mind where there are no phones, computers and internet. It still won't solve our issues and we would still remain as miserable as humans.

The solution to our misery lays somewhere deeper, beyond our external triggers and it's been there all this time under our nose. Some might even say it's obvious!

It's attention!

It's the attention that actually matters. Even if we don't have phones, paying attention to our "negative" thoughts and being stuck in them, is as bad as choosing to scroll our phone for 1 hour.

While, I would agree that social media in particular, makes it easier to fool us into using our attention wrongly, in the end, is not the phone or social media that is responsible for our actions, it's the attention and what do we decide to do with it.

On the contrary, lately I have been feeling quite grateful for technology and for all the opportunities it made possible. For example, us connecting through thousands of kilometers across the world and me being able to share thoughts with millions of people.

Isn't that mind blowing?

💬 Let me know what are your thoughts on this!