I didn’t mean to imply that the car is all bad. Just car dependency. If we had a truly integrated transportation system with other options, things would overall be better.
I don’t dispute many of your points. We do live in extreme luxury compared to people just a few decades ago.
But some of these “upsides” you mention are about to bite us in the rear.
Have you ever been around old people with mental defects? I was in a clinic for the elderly one time, and there was an old lady tied down to a bed screaming that she was having a baby. This woman was 80+ years old, but she was hallucinating that she was 19. Her “life” was misery for all concerned, and they kept her a prisoner in this hospital, because no one could care for her but neither could they let her die. I’ve seen entire buildings dedicated to caring for people like that. As the population ages and birth rate declines, we are rapidly approaching crisis in managing the elderly. What happens when the costs of caring for crippled elderly people exceeds our ability to provide for them?
Obviously, nobody wants to die. Are we supposed to euthanize old people? Are we supposed to stop treating their diseases past a certain point? Should we admit that some people are just unviable as organisms and let their medical conditions kill them? Or maybe we should just go back to the good ol’days were most women died in childbirth and the rest died at thirty.
Of course not. Those are all hideous ideas.
But the alternative is the consumption of increasingly precious resources, ever increasing pollution and urban sprawl, antibiotic-resistant bugs, and all the other problems that attend overpopulation. Not very convenient at all.
Some of us prefer the old-fashioned method that when you call a business a person actually answers the phone instead of the technologically “improved” method whereby first you need to select from a choice of 5 options, and then you have to select from a choice of 4 options, and then you have to select from a choice of 5 options–after which you get put on hold.
Except in the good ol’ days you could call customer services and reach a friendly real person who could do absolutely fuck-all to DO something about whatever your problem was. You had to go to the bank, the post office IN PERSON. Remember the appalling times banks kept?
I’m not going to argue that “all technology is bad,” but until it provides us with more leisure and happiness (which it will never do until we make some major social/economic changes), I don’t see how most implementations of technology are “good” for us in a universal sense.
You mean you work a 6 day, 55-60 hour, week and cooking and cleaning take up the rest of your time?
Adequate medical care was non-existant only as far back as a 100 years. Travel, even the very idea of holidays for the masses is about as new. As is workplace safety.
Life-expectancy and leisure time has skyrocketed in our lifetime.
Technology advances in food production, transportation and storage have made hunger extinc in western society. That might not make you happy, it makes you a lot less miserable.
The simpler life was a lot more grim than you give it credit for.
Like I said, my intent is not to knock technology. Some of it is wonderful. However, the way much of it has integrated into modern daily life has been a negative. I don’t wish to throw out the penicillin with the cell phones, but neither are the truly useful technologies good arguments for the not-so-useful ones.
Human productivity has increased enormously in even just the last 60 years or so, yet we’re still figuring out how to afford to pay our bills. Technology should liberate us from the drudgery and non-fulfilling aspects of life, but somewhere we crossed a line and now all technology does is move the goalposts. The next advancement is the one that’ll solve our problems.
You’re missing a vital point. You still have work to pay your bills because you are accustomed to all that technology. If you’d be content with a forties lifestyle: basic housing, no car, no meat every day, no phone, no tv etc. you could get away with working a 1 day workweek. Because the basic needs have become incredibly cheap.
But since you want acces to all that technology…
But I can’t. Basic needs are not incredibly cheap. If people could have basic housing, food, and clothing for 1 work day a week you’d see people doing it.
There is a Peanuts strip about this (there is always a Peanuts strip about anything 
)
Snoopy is lying atop his doghouse pondering about how he doesn’t need to hunt for his food, risk freezing, etc. He concludes that yes, he certainly has it easier than his grandfather.
Next panel:
Dog and doghouse covered in grass clippings. “Of course, I have to put up with things my grandfather never dreamed of”).
Yes, you can communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime! Of course, now you are expected to communicate…
I don’t have a cell for largely this reason.
As far as new technology- things that did not exist when I was born- Computer-related processes
and products have made a big difference in my life, but nothing else come readily to mind. food,
housing, cooking (I have never owned a microwave), refrigeration, transportation (I do not have GPS),
laundry, bathing, hard cover reading material- all those are not significantly different. My two
medical prescriptions (Indomethacin for blood pressure and Lisinopril for gout) were discovered
since I was born, but Colchicine, another gout medicine, is 100s of years old.
Modern Air Cargo shipments put fresh fruit on your table.
In January.
Including strawberries.
There’s a wrinkle to this conversation that hasn’t been mentioned yet:
You are benefiting from technologies you may never use.
More to the point, a person can say “I have taken no benefit from technology, I live a simple life with no cellphone, cable TV, or internet.”
But the technology exists, and other people are using it. Just because this theoretical luddite doesn’t use technology, don’t mean in the following week, his life isn’t saved using advanced Heart Attack medications that prevent damage to the heart muscle. There is a whole pantheon of technologies that exist beyond your world view that are available, whether you acknowledge them or never encounter them.
Some are often beyond your conception and subtle. A guy working for VMWare optimises some scheduling code, allowing a virtual machine to go to sleep 2% faster when it no longer needs processing power. That update is rolled out to datacenters worldwide, and ends up saving millions of dollars in power consumption. The world is a greener place, and the average schmo has no clue.
Do people actually use microwaves all that much? I don’t think unplugging mine for a month would greatly inconvenience me. The only things I really use it for are heating up mugs of tea that I’ve allowed to go cold, warming up baby food (which you’re not supposed to do anyway) and occasional defrosting. I couldn’t imagine actually trying to cook with a microwave.
It’s not uncommon for me to cook food and refrigerate it for the coming week, followed by using the microwave to heat it, when ready. So yes, while I don’t cook with the microwave, it is a part of my preparation routine-- especially since there are some things that are better served with the added moisture.
This is a very good point.
Let’s examine some of my neighbors who just happen to be Amish and themselves utilize a very, very low level of technology - no phones, cars, electricity from the grid, etc.
Amish women are more than happy to utilize modern polyester and polyester blend fabrics (in appropriately plain solid colors, of course) that are less prone to staining and don’t require ironing than the natural fiber fabrics their grandmothers and great-grandmothers used. If you think that’s trivial you don’t have to care for a half dozen or more kids where being able to skip a chore like ironing everyone’s clothes gives you more time for other necessary things.
The Amish are more than happy to utilize modern medical technology at the highest level in order to preserve life. It’s kind of weird when a bunch of people looking like extras in a historical drama show up at a modern medical center to pay for something like a kidney transplant in cash but it’s been known to happen.
The Amish do use calculators rather than paper and pencil for routine math needs.
The Amish are happy to shop at stores that utilize modern transportation, including just-in-time stocking and air freight.
When the Amish do have a need to travel they will utilize technology more advanced than the horse, including hiring drivers, riding trains and busses, and in matters of life or death utilizing medical helicopters.
So while the Amish don’t use modern technology in their daily lives they do, arguably, benefit from it. In some cases, it saves their lives. In other cases - no iron fabrics for instance - it does free up their time for other things, in other words, provide convenience.
This is even more true for the rest of us. I don’t utilize all modern technology directly, but it does benefit me even as it produces some annoyance. One thing I’ve learned from the archaically dressed neighbors, though, is that we do have the ability to choose what technology we use day to day. For example, I have a cell phone but I’ve blocked texting. Oddly enough, when I asked for that my cell provider rep said I wasn’t the only one doing that.
Sure, modern tech makes my life more convenient - fresh vegetables and fruit all year round, exotic foods easily available, news from around the world whenever I feel a need to be informed instead of having to go to the library and dig through foreign newspapers, easy travel anywhere in the world should I have a need to travel, better medical tech than any time in history, all sorts of things.
Technology integrated into the human lifestyle is more convenient and enhances life, not all of it does however, computers are a great example, to use one in the past you really needed to transform yourself into a bit of a geek, which is for many a unnatural human lifestyle, we conformed to it. Now with things like tablets, integrated systems and more intuitive software and OS’s it is getting more and more that technology is being transformed for us.
That to me is the difference, when we serve technology vs when technology serves us. Who is the master and who is the servant?
Where I live, I could rent a room, pay utility bills (without mobile phone and internet), and buy food and occasional new clothes, working two days a week at minimum wage, and I imagine most people could do something similar. So, if you had a job that pays average wage, then certainly you could do it on one day’s pay.
The reason I don’t is that I’d be sitting around bored, doing fuck all, for 5 days a week.
You would? Think about it. Your boss comes to you and says they’re going to quintuple what you make now. Do you immediately try to work out how to go part time, so you can live paycheck to paycheck with more free time? Or do you continue your current perfectly comfortable lifestyle, free of the financial pressures most Americans live with day to day? Trust me - the latter leads to higher quality free time, and less concern about what you’ll do for money when you retire and you’ve nothing but.
But I’ve seen people do what you describe. A friend was left her parents’ house when she was in her 20s, and her cost of living is pretty low. She works for a temp agency 3-4 months to build up a small cash reserve, and does nothing the rest of the year. This has been going on about 25 years.