Technology And The Simple Life

Contemplating equilibrium

This past Monday my wife and I went to see Fran Lebowitz. I’ve got to admit that I’ve loved her from the first moment I ever heard her comment on men’s hats. Her politics might be quite far from my tastes, but her views on men’s hats are spot on.

One fascinating thing about Ms. Lebowitz is that she uses neither a cellular phone, nor a computer. When it comes to technology, she’s old school, stuck in the 1970’s all the way.

That to me is quite wonderful to contemplate.

Photo by Logan Voss on Unsplash

I have a photo of myself and Ms. Lebowitz to insert here, but alas, it’s on my wife’s phone and I’ve got no idea how to easily move it from her Apple Land to my Google Land, so you’re stuck with this Red, White, and Blue blob.

I’ve got a like - hate relationship with technology.

I like laptop computers. They allow me to do my writing wherever I desire. I like the internet, it allows me to dive amazingly deep into whatever subject might be tickling my fancy at the moment. I like this Substack platform, it allows me to publish and find readers with relative ease.

But that’s about it on the ‘I like’ side of the ledger.

I guess that I don’t mind email, I just tend to ignore it, buying more storage from the folks at Google whenever the volume of unread messages grows close to the limit.

But I hate the phone. I hate it when it rings. I sometimes swear into space when I hear a text notification. I’m admittedly a bit contrary about the phone though, because I do like calling people. I’d much rather call than text or email.

I really hate the spell check feature here that keeps changing the name Lebowitz to Leibowitz! Every damn time, no matter how many times I hit the undo button. Computer intelligence my ass, this thing’s as dumb as a box of rocks, as my old grandfather was wont to say.

Ultimately, my aversion to most technology makes me a pain in the ass to get ahold of.

-As a quick aside, Google tells me that ‘ahold’ is an informal word that shouldn’t be used in proper or serious writing, but I notice that it is used in the New Yorker, so clearly the Google folks don’t know jack!-

But I can’t be nearly as difficult to get into contact with as Ms. Lebowitz, so I figure that I must be doing OK.

I do though often fantasize about how much simpler things were before these gizmos appeared in everyone’s hands. About the time when I was young; when you walked away from the phone on the wall you became completely unreachable. There was great freedom in that, a freedom that certainly doesn’t exist today.

Because of that and of those memories, I often find myself thinking enviously about Ms. Lebowitz. About the freedom she still possesses, but that I gave up, lured by the seductive idea of being able to reach anyone at anytime.

I think that as technology continues to embed itself deeper and deeper into our lives, each of us will eventually need to come to a decision point. We will need to decide, what technologies enhance our lives, and so should be embraced, and what technologies detract from our lives, and so should be jettisoned from them.

The answers to those questions will be as varied as there are people in this world. But I don’t think that we will continue on the path of just uncritically adopting everything new, on the assumption that it will make our lives better. Rather I think we will begin carefully considering technologies, and their actual impacts on our lives.

Probably the youngest among us, having grown up with technologies those of my generation couldn’t even dream of, will lead the way in these processes of personal discernment.