A Simple Life

            Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go back to living the simple lives humans lived before we had all this technology. It doesn’t take long for me to discard such a romantic notion; it would be horrible. Yes, my dismissal of it is in part due to the fact that I love video games – not to mention the easy access to writing research offered by the internet – but the living conditions that accompany the lack of technology are dreadful. Yet, the dream of going back to live a simpler life keeps on resurfacing, and not just in me.

            When such ideas keep resurfacing, it’s good to pay attention to them, because they tend to be telling us something about our environments. Frequently, it’s our brains trying to find a way to change something, though it doesn’t necessarily know what. In this case, I believe the important part isn’t so much the idea of going back in time, but the idea of a simpler life – more notably, a life not as cluttered with the technology that our existence now revolves around.

            As much as technology has done for us, and as wonderful as it is, there is no doubt that it has made life vastly more complicated. Almost everything we need to do is easier now, but there’s another type of strain the technology seems to put on us, seemingly offsetting it. We have a responsibility to the technology – to keep it functioning, to continually learn how to use it as it updates and evolves, and to be available when someone tries to contact us through it. In addition, now that we have instant access to the whole world and most of the knowledge in it, many people feel a responsibility to know what’s going on in the world at all times – as if, simply by having that information, they could somehow make a difference.

            I think technology has put a pressure on us that humans have never had to deal with before, and that has awakened in many of us a desire to go back – back to a simpler life. However, that simpler life wasn’t better; in many ways, it was worse. At any rate, backwards isn’t ever the correct direction to travel – we must always keep moving forwards.

            Why should we go back in time to when we had less technology when technology makes everything so much easier? Instead, we should take advantage of what we have learned, and use it to push forward toward that simple life we want. We’ve already made life easier with technology; now it’s time to adapt what we have made to give us the lives we want. It’s either that, or we wait for our evolution to catch up to an industry that is advancing faster that we can keep up with.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

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If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.