Technology Gets Old

                Every time a big new electronic or tech product comes out, it is hailed as making life easier and happier. Sure, we are on to the marketing hype and hesitant to take advertisers’ words at face value, but we buy the product anyway. Maybe it doesn’t meet their lofty promises, but surely it must make us somewhat better off, right? Well, no.

                From a psychological standpoint alone, these new purchases are doing nothing positive for us. We buy them to be better off, and sometimes we even are. However, the improvements quickly become routine. A new phone might be amazing for a month or so, each new feature noticed with every use, but before long it is old news, and is used without a second thought. We could be answering emails at double the rate we could before, but now that is the new normal, and no longer impressive. Our memory is very short when it comes to technology, and there is always ennui and a desire for a better version of what we already have.

                Thus, no matter how much more efficient all these gadgets make us, they will never make us happy. Technology is not a field that will ever leave us satisfied. In fact, due to the rapidly changing nature of the field, it is an ever-present cause for desire and discontent. Who cares that the amount of information at our fingertips would dazzle the previous generations? We take it for granted, and our short memories do not allow us the proper perspective to appreciate what we have in relation to what our predecessors did.

                Technology has surely improved our lives greatly, and is worth pursuing for the leaps in quality of life that it can provide us. The caveat is that it should not be looked to to make us happy.  In that respect, we are no better off now than ever before. Until we start being able to alter our brain states directly, ushering in a whole new super-fun dystopian world, look to other channels for a sense of fulfillment.