When Did We Let Life be Defined by Technology?

There are those who would say I'm far too retro - too caught up in what life WAS to live it fully as it IS.  I've wrestled with this counter-complaint for a couple years now and I will not cave from my stance.  Technology dominates our life and appears hell-bent on ruining it.

Don't get me wrong.  I love my little technology boosts.  I love how interconnected I am with family and friends.  I love answers to questions on the tips of my fingers.  I love movies at home with a selection to die for back in the 1970's.  HBO?  Heck, I'm my own HBO now.

But what's been lost?  Children becoming atomatonactic drones flitting from one CGI game to the next.  Lovers meeting with a grocery list of qualities and electronic winks that mean nothing more than desperation.  Walks in the rain because you didn't first check the weather channel before stepping outside.

What about sports?  For decades television has piped these mind-numb-ers into our homes, stealing the vitality we might have owned had we risen from our asses and got out and exercised.  This thought process has led me where I'm at - Where did we lose ourselves to technology?

I love football, basketball and tennis.  I even watch them on TV.  I was trained as a child to rely on television for entertainment as well as a place to visualize myself doing something great through the acts of other people.  This has not set well with me for years now.  I once enjoyed the great outdoors as the ultimate playground.  That's the last thing our technology mongers want to hear today.

They can't put the melancholy wind of autumn into their programming nor can they add the crisp cold of winter.  The luscious smells of spring giving way to summer's heat and shade's beckoning call.  One day they will.  One day those holograms will be so perfected, you will walk "outside" in your Wii box into a perfect autumn or snowy winter.

I feel the internet and all its matchmaking technology has robbed much of our population's lives of love.  That first meeting where everything is awkward and thrilling and fearful and exultant all at once.  I know that once two people 'hook up' through the various dating sites things can approach those chaotic emotions just listed. 

This is like the ultimate cheat.  Asking that person out, or striking up a conversation that appears short-lived at first but grows into hours is lost.  We market ourselves through our technology.  Instead of discovering who the other person is, we buy into telling others about who we are.  I suspect not a few people out there propagate who they DESIRE to be instead of the truth.

I've noted I spend less time interacting with human beings in person and more online or on the cell.  There is something dark here.  Dark and lonely.  Maybe it's just me.  Maybe I am a throwback to yesteryear.  I not only straddle the line of the last of the baby boomers with the next generation, I also straddle the line of technology as a blessing or a curse.

My ultimate conclusion weighs in heavily on the curse side of things.  Yet as soon as I say that, arguments form in my head of all the benefits of technology.  I wouldn't be able to write like this and get an audience like what is available online.  I wouldn't be able to start up a publishing company.  I certainly couldn't speak with people all over the United States as well as most of the world for such small amounts of money.

The Biblical adage of 'everything in moderation' has to be the solution, because if it's not, all that is left to us is a full-bore, nerve-wracking trip into ever increasing complications of technology or total abandonment of the same.  I think Thoreau wouldn't have had a chance at transcendental meditation if he lived today.  Far too many distractions for that.

As for me, I'm off for a walk.  Where?  I don't care.  Why?  To fill my lungs with evening's air, my ears with evening's song and my heart with evening's promise of life and relaxation.  I'll smell more than just roses and I'll begin to feel alive again.

Where did we lose this?  When we decided that progress meant more to us than the intangible exquisities of life.  This can be traced back for centuries if not millenia.  The good thing is that this condition is reversible.  Pardon me while I shift into reverse for awhile...