The technological revolution marked the transformation of the way of life for most of the Earth’s human inhabitants from agricultural to industrial. It finalized our migration away from the simple life and into a world of electrical devices and antidepressants. Instead of growing our own food, we slave our lives away in factories in order to earn money for which we buy food doped up with growth hormones and shelf life extending agents.
An introduction of technology into our lives came with a promise of easier living that would afford us “more free time”. And many modern technological devices truly delivered. Take washing machine for example – getting 5 kg of clothes properly washed by hand would take at least an hour of arduous labor. But now that we have washing machines and electricity, all one needs is a few short minutes to load the machine up, add laundry detergent and press a button or two. While your laundry is being washed, you are free to do whatever you want because washing machines take care of business automatically, without wearing your back and knuckles out.
However if you take a look at our technological advances as a whole, you’ll notice that while they do make our lives easier and buy us free time by turning otherwise arduous and lengthy chores into a stint of pressing a few buttons, they also seem to speed the time in which we live up, leaving us feeling pressured, like there never are enough hours in our days to catch up with our lives. We have all these devices that save us time by doing work for us, yet there’s constantly so much more to do we feel overloaded and stressed out. We have indeed become the tools of our tools.
The complexity of our lives as of late, despite all these gadgets that are supposed to make them easier, has become rather dizzying. So what gives? What went wrong that we have to work our lives toward simple now? Is way back – a rewind, so to speak – fathomable? Cause I already have an answer to whether it’s doable. I’m just unsure whether general, dumbed down public that’s so addicted to filtered reality still has the wits to understand that the path I’m undertaking, the path that takes me back to the basics, back to the time when human identity was defined by what one does, and not by what one owns (Jimmy Carter, anyone?), is a path that’ll free me from the life I’ve planned, so I can have the life I’m meant to live.
The beginning of every unwritten book starts today. As Socrates suggested, many are the thyrsus bearers, but few are the mystics. There will always be ill wishers, there will always be someone who’ll tell you that the path you are taking is wrong. The trick is in finding courage to not give in to the temptation to believe it. Walk with confidence towards the star that shines the brightest for you. Simple life simplifies the universal laws by which we live. Simplify your life and the universe will respond in kind. And as you return to the simple life, you’ll realize that the more things you live without, the richer you are.