Technology – of the high-tech, high-convenience, high-consumption kind – seems to have taken on the role of savior..
“There’s an app for that,” seemingly whether you want to lose weight or live better, produce food or conserve wilderness.
Unfortunately, it is a false savior, actively producing more of the ” solutionist” approaches that see many a side-effect of stupid lifestyles unfit for the ecological relations into which they are embedded as a mere problem to solve by the application of yet another techno-fix, try to medicate the very human condition to create blissful states of average emotions rather than learn to deal with the reality of life.
One of those simple realities is that we have increasingly been achieving greater comfort through the application of ever-more technology and the use of ever-more energy, to the point where we are changing the very Earth’s climate – and using more of the same technology and energy to try to keep us comfortable anyways.
It has come to the point where the first reaction to a low room temperature is turning up the heating, not donning a sweater…
Whether to create a better life for ourselves, or to address the problems we’ve been creating or may be facing in the future – and also, whether these are of the “new normal” kind of climate disruption or simply the usual kind of facing life’s everyday challenges – greater skill and better habits will be necessary. They are what we can acquire, and what we always carry with us.
Shall we learn, together, and get on to better?