Incongruity of our lives



I was reading an article yesterday about humans' rising over-dependence on technology. The advancement of technology has brought umpteen comforts to our lives. The drudgery of tasks has been replaced by the remote-operation of machines. Technology has become an important part of our life. The mere thought of living without modern-day comforts would be dreadful. It would be foolish to argue that technology is not good for humanity because the advancement of society to a great extent means advancement in technology. However, there are some who believe it's taking us away from nature. From being an integral part of our environment, we started altering our environment and now exploiting it beyond repair. Mahatma Gandhi famously said, "There is enough for everyone's need but not for greed". Even ancient civilizations focused on harmony between man and nature. Today though we would like to argue for same ethos, the truth is it would be a superficial display.

People in the past century were fortunate that technologies were simple and they could know how things work. Most of our generation would not really know how common things work. Though it's not too difficult to google stuff or log on to how stuff works but increasingly we are relying on technology even to know about it. Imagine some time in future, when everything is mainly done by machines and humans are relegated to their supervision. If the machines stopped responding, there would be a chaos, people would not know how to survive. For their clothes to food, water to shelter, everything would come to them without effort and they would not know how to get it from nature. Such a thought of vulnerability is pondered in the article. While some may call it delusional and pessimistic, one thing which comes across is our relation with technology and nature.

It would be in our best interest to be aware of our place on this earth and our dependence on nature. For as we go on mindlessly exploiting it's resources, we are weakening our links with the nature and in turn increasing our vulnerability. Also, we should command technology to aid in our quest for sustainable growth of this planet and not become subservient to the technology we ourselves developed.



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