Remember when...

"We are flooded with data but starved for wisdom" ~Margaret Kelly~

I have returned from my blogging hiatus (aka: my awesome vacation) and I have a whole slew of new things to rant about!! So, as to not waste anymore time, here goes the first one!

Do you ever notice how our lives are ran by our electronic devices these days? I'm not that old but even I remember when a text message message meant you were sitting down to write a letter to someone!

In the process of making everything in life quicker and easier, we have also made it more complicated. Think about it...computers and the Internet and smartphones are amazing, as long as they function properly. I can't count the number of times my day has come to a screeching halt because my computer decided to freeze or the Internet connection was cut for some reason. I can't do much of anything at work if my electronics aren't working. I am crippled like a car with no motor when that happens. It makes me wonder how people got work done 20 years ago...

When I was a kid we had a yellow rotary telephone, no call waiting, answering machine or voice mail, no computer until I was a teenager, no Xbox or playstation, and certainly no ipod. I had a Walkman and a stunning collection of cassette tapes on which I recorded my favorite songs from the radio. If I wanted to talk to someone on the phone I had to actually pick up the phone and dial the number (which took about 5 minutes on that lovely yellow phone!) and pray that the other person was actually home to answer my call. If I was bored (not a smart thing to be in our house unless you wanted some super uncool farm chores to do!) I went outside and found or made up things to do. Would you believe that even without all of these things that today's kids HAVE to have, I turned out pretty good (if I do say so myself!!)

The only facebooks we had were comics and picture books, snail mail (or morse code) was THE way to send messages and information to people, and cell phones were the size of cinder blocks (not to mention as expensive as some small foreign cars)! My personal favorite from the "pre-technology" era is that when you called the 800 number on your bank statement (or whatever) because you had a question, a real live breathing person actually answered the phone (OMG you mean real people used to do that??)

Life ran at a much slower pace back then and sometimes (ok most of the time) I wish it still did. Even with the convenience that modern technology has given us, I think it has taken something away from us as well. People don't seem to want to talk to each other anymore...they just text or email them instead. I'm as guilty as the next guy of this because texting is so convenient and can be done inconspicuously but it's a little ridiculous when you are trying to have a face to face conversation with someone and their phone won't shut up or when you are trying to teach a bunch of kids and they just have their eyeballs and fingers glued to their phones. I remember when cell phones weren't even an issue in school because nobody had one...we just had to worry about getting caught passing notes in class instead!

I'm not saying that technology is all bad, after all I am laying on my couch typing this post on my iPad as we speak, but if some kind of disaster were to come along and wipe out our electronics' capabilities, life as we know it would come to an abrupt stop. If no one knows how we functioned before technology, then we will have no way of recovering from such a disaster.

Besides, life is too short and much too valuable to just blast through it at a million miles an hour...I think people in general would be much happier if they just slowed down a little bit and "disconnected" themselves from the world every now and then. It's actually quite liberating to turn your phone off or ignore your emails and just live without the cyber distractions that constantly bombard our neurons. With that, I'm done for the night...don't try to call or message me as my phone, iPad, and computer are being turned off for the night :)