Do I really need a new phone?

Recently, I lost my phone, and here is my experience without one for a while. Nowadays, not having a phone is like being handicapped; it's like you lack an arm or a leg because there are just so many things you won’t be able to do. Things like communicating, getting information, speed thinking, note-taking, purchasing things and much more. A great deal of our lives is getting digitalized, making these little computers indispensable, like an extension of our bodies.

My experience was different in the sense that I deliberately chose not to get one because I wanted to test just how addicted or dependent I had become to my phone and things like TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp and many other apps, which have not only become essential but literally addictive. Taking TikTok for example, its utility is undeniable, but like everything else, in high quantities, it can be destructive.

We have reached a period in human history where we are constantly innovating and introducing artificially made objects into our lifestyle. When you consider how nature works and how innovation or evolution takes place, you notice that it is a slow process which happens over a very long period of time, leaving the body and DNA to adapt to the change. Whether it's our human body or our environment, our habits are an adaptation to our environment

How things have changed

Nowadays, we see technology surround us more and more. Today, we no longer have a lot of use for our legs, we have cars; we no longer have that much use for our hands since machines are slowly replacing them; and in the future, we might even become useless with the advent of AI, which will basically do everything. If you know nature, then you know that everything has a purpose, which means we might evolve to no longer have arms and legs anymore. I can’t even imagine what we could evolve to be if we were useless.

An interesting thought is the fact that we are at the top of the food chain with no natural predators. It will be interesting to see how the biggest predators turn into inoffensive creatures.

These days, we have phones to look at and countless machines being invented to “make our lives easier." One after the other, our tasks are being reduced, and with something like AI, having a job might actually be something of the past.

What the future might look like

We will definitely find something new to do, another problem to solve, whether it is expansion beyond our planet or growing in consciousness (whatever that means), or else we might just become no better than a sloth. The future might unfortunately look like those sci-fi movies where you have huge buildings, no skies anymore, humans having robot parts, pollution everywhere due to all the industrialization, interplanetary travel etc.

When we usually watched those movies, we felt like they were things that couldn’t happen, but now they're starting to feel way more real.

Should we slow down innovation?

Innovation isn’t something we can stop; it's more like life just taking its course, it can be slowed down, but it can’t be stopped. A lot of people are already noticing the fast pace at which we are innovating; in just the last 3 decades, there has been more ground-breaking innovation than the last 10 decades combined. Just to give you a little perspective, the cell phone was invented in 1973 and the personal computer in 1975, and in less than a decade, we’ve moved from that to “super computers,” which are capable of doing trillions of calculations in seconds. If that's not scary, then I don’t know what is.

Innovation isn’t moving at a linear rate but at an exponential rate. It is a call for concern

I am overthinking

This conversation left from me just thinking about my phone to me worrying about the future 😂. Just from something simple you can have a wider perspective on what is happening around the world.

Thanks for reading ☺️

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