My Big Fat Technology-Obsessed Life

or Rat Racer Rejects Restricting Rules Regarding Regimented Routine

I’m not playing by the man’s rules any more. I’m fed up with coloring inside the lines; I’m sick of following the herd; I’ve had it with a life of doing what everyone else expects of me and burying my own hopes and dreams under six feet of petty bourgeois trivialities. It’s time for me to take control of my own life and turn off the autopilot. The hour has come for me to fly solo. Take this life and shove it; I ain’t living here no more. Of course I’m paraphrasing a grammatically-challenged country western song but the sentiment is highly appropriate.  Note to self: quickly determine exactly where and how I will live.

Just look at this place that I call my life. I can’t believe that I am killing myself with work just so that I can have the right kind of cell phone for a person of my stature—whatever my stature is supposed to be. All that I know is that my old cell phone made me feel embarrassed when I used it in public. Everyone knows that there are only 2-3 acceptable brands of cell phones and that all others make you look like a complete failure. Every time you use one of those off-brand model you may as well just hang a sign around your neck that screams out to the world, “I can’t afford an iPhone!”  

Studies point out that these devices are just a more efficient way to waste time and that they systematically shorten our attention spans. I could probably come up with a joke about diminished attention spans but most of you wouldn’t bother to read it if it ran over two sentences.  I’m going to take my new phone and throw it off the next bridge that I happen upon, but first I’ll post about it on Facebook and Twitter.

“Time-saving devices” is the description they used to pin on technology, at least back when a toaster was considered a scientific advancement. You don’t hear that too much these days and few would go so far as to suggest that an MP3 player saves time or contributes anything in the way of enhancing our well-being. More and more it’s like we’ve all turned into Stephen Hawking types who are confined to wheelchairs and forced to communicate via keyboards, although he probably gets out of the house more than the average American teenager.  Our over-dependence on tech gadgetry is more a reflection of our overall level of laziness than our desire to be more productive.  I mean, seriously, does anyone use a remote control because they want to save time?

In a nutshell I think that it’s safe to say that we are all running frantically on the treadmill of life just to be able to spend an increasingly larger percentage of our lives doing doodly-squat. If you need further proof of this assertion let me point out that I just wasted time Googling “doodly-squat” and found that “diddly-squat” is also acceptable.

If I run like hell I can still make the 08:15 bus and be at work a little after nine. Maybe no one will even notice that I’m a couple minutes late.  I can only pray.