I celebrated technology last night—exploited the heck out of it, in fact; quite a whiplash-inducing about-face for a techno-curmudgeon who typically spends his days fretting and groaning about technology's hazards.
However, I do have moments of objectivity when I'm compelled to acknowledge my dependence on technology and admit how easy life is because of it. But, as any true curmudgeon would when cynically pondering the future, I also have to ask how much easier life could and should get as a result of technology's unwavering advance.
Last night, though, was a time for unabashedly basking in technology's benevolence. My wife, you see, is out of town visiting friends, leaving me to grapple with single-parenthood for a few days. This circumstance forced me to come face to face with a certain reality: My kids—ages 7 and 4—have become dependent upon meals; they want three of them...every day. It's become quite the entitlement for them.
Obviously, I've been aware of this dependency of theirs for some time but in a detached sense; I've always known they want dinner, and just as surely, I've always known that dinner will always be there for them to eat at dinnertime. I just never really dwell on how that actually happens day in and day out. Only when periodically thrust into the role of "preparer of meals" do I appreciate the fact that dinners need to be...well...prepared.
Yesterday was my chance, and did I ever deliver. Actually, we delivered; technology, the primary cook, and I, technology's sous chef. We provided my two children with a hearty, nutritious, and honest-to-goodness dinner of pork roast and gravy (gravy!), garlic mashed potatoes, broccoli, and cauliflower, all pre-cut, pre-cooked, and lovingly microwaved to piping-hot perfection in a grand total of 11 minutes. Eleven minutes! Roughly the time it used to take my grandmother to clean the dirt off the head of cauliflower she harvested from the vegetable garden she doggedly tended all summer long.
About the only feature the manufacturer failed to provide with my pre-packaged, beautifully pre-formed hog was an automated hand designed to jut up, offer me a pre-mixed and pre-chilled martini the moment I peeled back the plastic cover, and shoo me to the sofa until chow time.
There's something disturbing about acknowledging that my pork roast was manufactured, that the gravy travels from China in converted supertankers, and that the old Arkansas pig farmer depicted on the package is a merely metaphorical representation of an industrial pork-processing conglomerate based in New Jersey. But my kids didn't care if their hog was farm-fresh or palletized; their bellies were full.
At first glance—OK, maybe even at the second or third glance—the following passage doesn't seem to have much to do with the means by which I provide sustenance for my children, but it's illustrative of that larger question (How much easier can and should life get?) my curmudgeonous alter-ego insists on asking. Plus, it has the word "hog" in it.
In this passage from 1776, the author, David McCullough, describes the colonial army that defeated the British: "It was an army of men accustomed to hard work.... They were familiar with adversity and making do in a harsh climate. Resourceful, handy with tools, they could drive a yoke of oxen or 'hove up' a stump or tie a proper knot as readily as butcher a hog or mend a pair of shoes."
These days, with technology just in the springtime of its maturity, we don't butcher hogs; we microwave full-course hog dinners, ready to eat in minutes, at the first hunger pang. Working overtime doesn't mean driving that yoke of oxen to plow a few more stump-strewn rows before sundown; it means sitting in an ergonomically designed chair pushing buttons for a few more hours. Many of us are so sedentary in our jobs and lives that we must allocate time to walk each day, lest we simply forget. Or we go to gyms to do nothing more than repetitively lift weight, in order to stave off full-body atrophy for one more day. Walking and lifting weight: those activities used to be called "life." Ironically, we now define them as leisure time.
Don't be fooled. For all my moaning over the last couple of paragraphs, don't think for a moment that I'm sitting here in a log cabin pounding away at technology on a piece of parchment with a quill. I'm no martyr to the cause. I am a man of my times and a fan of technology when it suits. Just ask my kids.
Michael Stuhlreyer is a business writer, a graphic designer, and president of Stuhlreyer Business Instruments, LLC, a Nashville-based firm specializing in the creation of marketing and sales support materials, as well as articles, case studies, and product profiles for technology companies. Email Mike at
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