There are times when I feel nostalgic for the days before computers, mobile phones and the Internet.
I thought computers and Internet connectivity would make life easier. Technology would make our lives better. Our electronic cottages would liberate us from the world of corporate slavery and free us to spend more time with our families.
Technology may have made many tasks faster but it hasn’t actually made our lives easier. It certainly hasn’t given us more time to give to others—our friends, our families, our significant others.
Technology hasn’t liberated us. In fact, in so many ways, it has enslaved us. Look around you and count how many heads are bent down on phones or how many ears are covered with earbuds or headphones.
We can no longer live without our gadgets. Don’t we all drive back home when we find we have forgotten our phone? Doesn’t panic set in when we cannot connect to the Internet? Doesn’t cold fear grip us when we can’t find our phone?
When the Internet is down, we cannot work. We cannot reach people. We cannot read the news. We cannot order food. We cannot book an airline ticket or a hotel room. We cannot find information, instructions, directions.
Without the Internet, we suddenly feel lost, paralyzed, disconnected to the world.
Technology allows us to do many things at the same time but it has also allowed the world to gain so much access to us that it now seems impossible to go on a real vacation. How can one truly unplug when you can be reached from practically anywhere in the world?
You can, of course, choose to put your phone off but would you risk drowning in guilt in case of an emergency? And then I remember how I lived the first three decades of my life. I felt no guilt then. But that’s because being incommunicado wasn’t a choice. There were no mobile phones then.
Young people ask how we survived without the mobile phone. And I tell them—we just did. How do you agree to meet up? We simply set a date, time and place and never change our minds. And this answer never fails to boggle their minds.
When I was in my twenties, I would write to my mother from the United States and my letter would take two weeks to reach her in the Philippines. She would then write back to me and it would take another two weeks for her reply to reach me.
I can’t imagine now how I had the patience to wait for a month to receive my mother’s replies to my letters. Now, if we don’t hear a reply within the hour, we become distraught thinking someone is probably dead somewhere in a ditch.
Yes, I feel nostalgic for those times—when I was less anxious and I was more patient. When kids read books and played on monkey bars, slides and swings. (I was one of those kids.) When people had fewer friends but only real ones. When electronic outages didn’t create panic and cause widespread, global disruption.