I have an observation about the world in 2016. It’s too easy. No, I get that life is hard so I am not talking about “making it” in the world today. That is still hard. But remember the immortal words of Mark Twain, “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

What I mean is that we have effectively taken the work out of just about everything. We have automated our way into complacency.

I have written on this before, but I have a little twist on the concept.

Back in the day (and yes, I am old enough to say that now) you had to work at everything. Cars had to be driven. No power steering or brakes, continual input from the driver. Go get a 57 Chevy and try to drive it and try texting. Phones were bolted to the wall and required … Dialing! We had to get up to turn the channels on the TV…and it was typically a dial!

Things required input. Physical input. Want to lose a few pounds, get rid of a little technology and get your happy butt up and move around to do stuff for once!

I saw a funny on FB the other day that was sadly very true. It showed a car with a stick shift and the phrase on the picture was “Millennial theft deterrent.” Quite true I suspect.

We have put life on easy mode and in doing so lost something. Mostly our presence of mind.

Listen, I like modern convenience, don’t get me wrong. But consider this; metal dashes. I grew up in the generation of metal dashes and very little (read no) seat belt use. Course to be fair there were not nearly as many folks on the road. However, back to metal dashes. You respected a metal dash. Trust me I know, I bounced off a few as a kid. You learned really quickly that the auto maker made them to last a lifetime, not cushion your head from bouncing off of them. You only bounced off them a few times before you learned to respect them and either belt up or sit in the back seat. Course my dad most often had two door trucks, so I just got really good at getting my hands up quickly to brace myself from a sudden stop.

My point here is that we learned to respect things, because as my son often says, “pain retains.”

We have been lulled into taking our hands off the wheel. No one, well very few, do anything themselves any more. I am a dying breed of shade-tree-mechanic. And the world has transpired against us and made it, in general, too difficult to do on our own. Everything, literally everything, is computer controlled.

Why do we need computer controlled fridges? Seriously, can we not even look in them to tell when we need food?

I heard a while back from a guy who worked security for a governmental group that one of the largest BotNets (that is a hackers network of your devices all connected together for greater computing power – look it up) ever found (at that time) was running on Internet enabled refrigerators! Refrigerators!

I am going to offend a few people here, but if you need your fridge connected to the Internet … Rethink your life. Seriously. You have become a slave to technology and the technology is winning!

However, I have to take some of my own medicine. Let’s face it, being in the IT industry means that I am a pusher of the current global drug of choice.

And yes, knowledge at your fingertips is a phenomenal thing. We no longer need to know a little about anything because Google knows a lot about everything. Knowledge has quite literally become universal. Third world countries are being gauged by their level of WiFi speed now as much as they are by their level of poverty!

Looking around the Starbucks I am in writing this, which is packed, and almost everyone is heads down in their technology.

It is insidious and has come on so subtly that we did not notice it taking over our lives.

Regardless of the nature of what has made our lives easier, be the form computer technology or improvements in hydraulic or electronic technology. Each has progressed society, of this I am not arguing. However, at a point we as humans began to lose basic skills which we may never regain. We are probably beyond that.

However, we can take back part of our lives. We can once again put our hands on the wheel and decide to drive the vehicles of our lives. We can choose to participate in life and not live it in the glass bubble of our digitally printed worlds.