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While the economy grew massively in the 20th century, something sinister happened in our private spaces. People’s homes became more cluttered as they accumulated evermore stuff.
It wasn’t a joyful experience. Instead, it often made owners feel stressed about their lives and their capacity to live freely. The more possessions that people had, the worse off they felt. There was just so much to manage.
In the 21st century, though, we’re solving clutter in ways that people never expected. Simple handheld devices and computers are consolidating dozens of household items into a single object. And now the average person can work anywhere they like, so long as they have a suitable chair and laptop.
But can technology make your life simpler? Haven’t we just moved all the baggage and clutter online?
If you take a look at media reports concerning the amount of time that people spend online browsing the internet and social media, you find a depressing narrative. We’re all addicted to our phones and the likes, shares, and comments of others. We’re stuck in an endless dopamine loop where we need to look at our devices every five minutes, just in case somebody texted us in the interim.
Technology, though, is just a tool. It’s how we use it that matters. The more we see it as a way to declutter our lives, the more positively people will see it.
When you think about it more carefully, technology is a compelling way to reduce your dependence on material possessions. It can help make your life simpler in various ways that help make you more functional in the long run. Let’s take a look at some examples.
Bio-tracking Devices
Let’s take bio tracking devices, for example. It would have been very challenging to get a readout of your biomarkers in real-time in the past. The only real method was to use expensive, state of the art hospital equipment. Today, though, that has all changed. All you need is a wrist tracker, and that’s it.
Products like this might sound like unnecessary additions, but they help make life simpler by keeping track of your health. They bring you out of a profound state of ignorance about your body’s condition and show you what you need to do to make it healthier. Thus, you’re not continually worrying about your current state. You have information that allows you to make the proper assessment.
Drone Technology
Let’s say that you want to film a holiday or even something for business. In the past, you had to go to enormous expense and bring all the relevant people together. There were no “set and forget” solutions out there on the market.
Now, though, there are drones for practically every application – at least according to sites like DrDrone. Many mobile camera devices are now so smart that they can follow you automatically as you run or cycle. And they also come with collision avoidance technology, allowing them to skirt around danger.
It’s Making Advertising Easier
You can automate your entire advertising campaigns these days with just a click of a button. And it’s changing the nature of working at a startup.
Nowadays, you don’t have to go to the same extremes to convince people that they should buy your products. Almost always, you can pass the lion’s share of the task over to technology. And even if you can’t, there are agencies out there that are willing to take over the process for you.
Getting people to believe it’s worth their time to part with their cash is hard when you’re trying to do it face to face. Automating the process takes all of the effort out of it. Thus, you’re able to expose your customers to your ideas and products repeatedly but without feeling like you’re dying. Eventually, they relent and come to accept that you can actually help them, even if they have annoying pain points that are getting in the way of the sale.
Autonomous Driving
The effort and complexity of learning how to drive and passing an exam are enormous. You have to arrange weeks of lessons and spend hours with an instructor. And even then, you might not get to grips with the process. It isn’t easy learning how to navigate the road when you share it with drivers who have many years of experience piloting a vehicle.
Autonomous driving takes much of the effort out of the process and is an example of how our lives will hopefully be more straightforward in the future. We will no more need to know how to drive a car than fit a boiler. For the first time, we don’t have to know anything about how the system works – somebody will always be there to help fix get back up and running the moment we have a breakdown. It’ll be more complicated than that.
Imagine how much simpler your life would be if you could get away from car ownership. You wouldn’t have to worry about fuel or anything like that. It’d all be so stress-free. And there would be no risk of getting any fines through the post from your local sheriff. Any traffic violations would be the responsibility of the vendor of the car.
You Don’t Have To Make Plans To Communicate With People
Communicating with people was always hard for most of human history. If you wanted to have a chat with a friend who lived on the other side of the country, you had to have a great horse. Nowadays, all you need is a cheap smartphone, and the job’s done.
Just think for a moment how much simpler this makes staying in touch. Everyone is there on your call list, just waiting for you to pick up the phone and dial them.
Technology, therefore, can make all our lives so much simpler. It’s just a matter of how we interact with it. It offers the potential for all of us to focus our efforts on the things that matter. But whether this will happen or not remains to be seen.
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