Leonard Valenzuela
As we grow older throughout the 21st century, technology will soon take over everyone’s life. Although this can be beneficial in a certain aspect, I find that it can also be a disadvantage in terms of social interactions.
In most of my engineering classes throughout the past four years of college, I’ve always heard a saying, somewhere along the lines of, “The laziest person will always find the easiest way to get the job done.” It concerns me to know that in the future, this concept will be in the minds of many.
Yes, it’s great we can resolve a situation in a timely and more efficient manner, but we never seem to think about the long-term effects; we think only about what we need to do at that moment, then never think about it again until another situation arises.
This has been a repeating factor in our lives since the dawn of technology. People have always been looking at ways to make life easier for themselves (which is not always the wrong way to go about things), but they forget to consider what it will do in the long run. Problems such as global warming, deforestation, animal extinctions, etc. are all results of what technology is doing to make our lives easier.
On top of what humans are doing to the natural state of the only planet we know of that can sustain life, we’re losing what it means to be human.
Our generation is of a digital age, where emotions are expressed in emoticons and messages of anger or of a serious tone can be conveyed by placing periods at the end of “K.” which in turn gets people upset. My personal favorite is trying to explain something in 140 characters or less.
Everyone nowadays seems to own some sort of smart device that people 50 years ago wouldn’t have conceived of. We look into our screens all day. Late at night we lie in bed, scrolling through various social media accounts, and often forget there’s a world outside that 1080p HD touch screen.
We lose touch of what it means to actually like something, and focus more on how many likes we can get on that Instagram picture.
It’s still upsetting to me to know that people find inanimate objects of more importance than everything else around them, and how they choose the priorities of their technology of choice over enjoying the day outside.
To the people that say they cannot live without their phone, I’d like to see you live in an inhospitable environment. To those of you that stay true about what’s going on in the world, I applaud you and hope you continue to seek the truth.
Nature will always find a way to balance itself. If we can’t go throughout our day without the technology we use to communicate with each other, how will we be able to live with each other when all that technology is useless?
I believe that we need relearn what it means to live with each other, to be human, rather than to live off our technology and forget the world around us.
