Technology Ruins Everything

I'm having an angry and resentful day, which is actually uncommon for me.

My gripe is this: technology makes communication so effortless that everyone seems to decide that if it is without effort, it probably isn't even worth it.

Maybe I have no right to write something like this, but to be frank, it is my prerogative, and that gives me the right to do whatever the hell I want in my little corner of the internet.

What is the encoded message here: I'm introspective because of the failure of people who have known me my entire life to send something as simple as a 2 line "congratulations" email when I graduated. Dude, it's the internet. It takes, like, 20 seconds.

And yet, the simplicity of that 20 second message seems to elude most of us.

I think a lot of these more nuanced bits of communication have fallen by the wayside because the ease of it all has bred complacence, or worse yet simple negligence. All of the bells and whistles that our little lives are nested into seem to just trivialize the truly important things, by overshadowing them with shiny noise.


So, the moral of the story: we would all be better off living in a bygone age where letters had to be premeditated at length, transported by ship, rail, and pony, and were remarkably prone to loss.

That way, no one would ever expect a 2 line email and be disappointed by its failure to materialize.

Wow, I swear it's not even that big of a deal. It just makes me wonder what in the world the "family support system" role is in a globalized world where few people have the inclination to send one another emails, let alone letters. Maybe we'd be better off born in incubators and issued to parents who have passed all the tests and earned the parenting license. Eventually old-fashioned reproduction would be outlawed & there would be nothing but the nuclear family to bother with. No more huge family gatherings or awkward interactions with people who you share nothing in common with but a little DNA.

Okay, maybe that wouldn't be as awesome as it seems.

I hate technology. Although without it, how could I find an audience to complain about it to?