Technology is Amazing!

I love technology. I love technology because it makes the impossible possible. I just saw a picture of a spiral galaxy on my screen saver. Years ago people could only conceive of the idea to gaze into far off places and now it’s a reality. I love technology because we’re now experiencing things we saw in movies. Video conferencing a la The Jetsons? Check. Paying for stuff with your phone? Done. Downloading thousands of songs and storing them in one little device? Yep. I LOVE it. This is AMAZING stuff. It reminds me of that video of Louis CK titled “Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy”:



I’m happy Louis! I still marvel at all of it! A friend of mine made a good point the other day: “Do you ever think about how you’re one of the few lucky people who gets to say they flew on an airplane? My great-grandparents didn’t have that privilege.” When he said that to me I had to stop for a minute because it never even occurred to me that would be special. It seems so normal now and that my friends, is amazing.

What I also love about technology is in a weird way I feel like I get to practice aparigraha, the yogic principle of nonindulgence, or using only what you need. What I mean is, with technology I feel like I can cut down on waste. Instead of buying hundreds of books and storing them in my apartment, cutting down trees for the paper, having to pay for shipping costs, etc. I can download it to a device and bing! It’s there. I love print, but now publishers can employ print on demand, which means they only print a book if someone will buy it. Sooo much less wasteful. I love that. Same thing with the iPod. I don’t need fill up boxes with CDs and their cases, now I can plug in my iPod and go to iTunes.

Mostly I love how unencumbered technology makes me feel. I can store my whole life, basically, on a laptop. That’s fantastic! I know we talk about how way back when we lived in simpler times, and that may be true, but these days I have less stuff. No boxes of photo albums. No huge piles of paper.

Technology is one of those things that shows me another world is not only possible, it’s probable.