Nowadays we live with a far superior level of comfort than that of our ancestors. And the truth is that human ingenuity keeps inventing, on a daily basis, new solutions that ease our everyday lives and increase our comfort zone.
The facility with which, except for economic reasons, we accomplished many of our desires, no matter how unprecedented and sophisticated they are, makes us sometimes forget its impact on our surroundings. We yield to consumptive whims and demand to possess the latest gadget. We laugh with a higher disdain when people from previous generations tell us: “you are so privileged, in my time ...”, without realizing that our children look at us with the same face. The reality is that in the last 60 or 70 years, each generation could afford to have a higher level of care and more sophistication than the previous, in its daily life. Basically, you take more things in your life for granted, for example you don’t have to wait for the right season to eat a certain fruit, which is to come, if need be, from the other side the world.
Communications are perhaps the best example of what I say: How many of us haven’t already experienced a profound disorientation by forgetting the cell phone somewhere or a huge annoyance for being a few hours in the workplace, without internet access for some kind of failure? When this type of thing happens we experience a sensation that nothing works, of complete powerlessness. And we consider it inadmissible. We are so conditioned by certain tools, work processes, facilities that we don’t even know what to do to overcome its fault.
I consider myself better informed about technological issues with each passing day. The computer is an essential tool in my work, and I master fairly well several applications, and think I'm even pretty self-sufficient, as I demonstrated in a previous post. But I find it quite easy to fall in an over-reliance on technology, and if by chance we were camping in a remote place, where mobile phones wouldn’t work and we couldn’t go to the social networks, we would almost have to do a detoxification, as if it were an addition. And it would be time consuming to let ourselves caught up by the beauty and simplicity happening around us. I think, for the sake of personal balance and appreciation of the everyday comfort, that we should impose ourselves, from time to time, an escape from the sophistication that surrounds our daily lives, spending a few days in a very rudimentary environment. Basically surrounding ourselves only on what is actually essential.
I am also an optimist and believe in the potential and kindness of human ingenuity. I refuse the catastrophic visions of the world in which man will perish swallowed by the technology developed to serve him.
But being an optimist I have also worried eyes on the resources we have and the use we make of them. As a parent of 3 children, I am primarily concerned with the world we will let for them to live when we're gone. And with the huge number of small things we take for granted, things that we have always known, and never crossed our minds that they could simply cease to exist. But with what we know today, it should be obvious to everyone that something has to change in the way we appropriate the resources that our planet offers, so that our descendants can experience a world like ours, rich in biodiversity and full unique experiences.
That they can smell a certain flower, delight with a bit of honey or a fabulous grilled fish. That they can bathe in the icy waters of a river, see with their own eyes some creatures so fantastic that not even with great imagination they thought would exist. Like tigers, whales and some other animals.