Technology takes control of our lives

In the beginning of the modern age, telegraphs and trains gave birth to the idea that convenience is more important than content and “speedier means” could make up for “unimproved ends”. Philosopher Henry David Thoreau countered, “The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian media scholar, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally, you lose touch with yourself.” In the 1970s, Alvin Toffler, an American futurist, spoke of the “future shock” as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies dealing with “too much change in too short a period of time”. Thomas Merton, a Cistercian monk, urged us to get out of the rat race and said, “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.”
Coming to contemporary times, it is estimated that an average American teenager deals with 75 text messages a day. One girl even managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for one full month. In our computer world, multi-tasking has become essential and in the process of saving time, we end up having no time for ourselves. Although, technology today claims to make life more comfortable and facilitates the process of living, but in fact, it tends to take control of us, slowly and surely. They force us to tune into “breaking news” that is happening almost daily. As Pico Iyer, the author of The Man Within My Head, writes in The New York Times, the traditional distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are also disappearing.
So, we have more to speak and less to say, maybe because we’re too busy communicating. As Iyer reminds us “we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines”. We need to slow down, without becoming less productive. We need to relax without wasting our life. We need to progress without being enslaved by it
This is the dilemma we are in. “The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them,” Iyer says. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to prioritise; images don’t show us how to process them. The danger is that all our life becomes samsara or a series of distractions. French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it tersely, “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries; and yet, it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He added that human problems come from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
The only way we can deal with this dilemma is by drawing “the emotional and moral clarity” that comes from our inner strength and our spiritual resources. Such spiritual resources make us feel better —calmer, happier and more focused — with the particular work that we do. They enable us to stay connected, while at the same time, enable us to maintain some distance. It encourages us to be fully involved while retaining some aloofness for we can see the whole and understand it better, only when we are also away from it.
So, coping with our contemporary world demands that we perceive the essential, not always the new things. It demands being creatively alone. Here the distinction that German thinker, Paul Tillich, makes between loneliness and solitude is very apt. “Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone,” Tillich said.

(The writer is a professor of science and religion)