Does Technology Make Life Better?

555 Words3 Pages
Technological innovations were meant to free people up from mundane, time-consuming tasks like hunting, gathering or growing food, doing laundry, or traveling on foot or by horse and buggy. The time saved by the invention of grocery stores, washers and dryers, planes, trains and cars should have provided a family enough leisure time for rest and relaxation. What modern society shows us today is exactly the opposite of what these new inventions should have given us, a less stressful life. Eating food and drinking clean water is a necessary part of normal human life. People cannot survive more than 7 days without water and typically no more than 3 months without food. Easily attainable and affordable food is a miracle of modern agriculture, a green revolution that freed the common man from a purely agrarian life dedicated to growing and harvesting enough food to feed one’s family or community. Fast food, a concept that took the world by storm has now fallen out of favor, being replaced by home-gardeners and a slow food movement that touts the benefits of personal gardens full of fresh, nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables versus the toxic, pesticide and chemical laden commercial foods readily available in supermarkets today. Fast food, that was equated with time-saving, gave us time, but did not give us better, healthier lives in the end. Traveling used to be possible if you could walk or ride a bike or take a one-way trip on a ship to a foreign land, never to return. Now, with planes, trains and automobiles, affordable by most middle-class people, going coast to coast within a week’s time is possible, so vacations to Hawaii or New York or California are just a plane ride away. But the pursuit of leisure time or the “vacation” has become almost like work itself, stressful as well as expensive. The ease of traveling by car makes going home for Thanksgiving at both

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