1988 - yards full of children; chalk-scraped sites; green-painted fresh walnuts; a bell of a popular ball; laugh and laughter; hunter's sleigh; leaves as the most fluctuating currency; Lutenitsa children's mouths oiled; stomach pain due to overeating with ginkgo; impressive collections of napkins and smells, etc., and so on.
2018 - empty yards; horns and shouts between jarred drivers; children with a locked-out look at the phone; children with earphones in the tram; children with tablet in hands on dinner table at home; children in front of the computer in sending an emoticon expressing emotion while the faces remain stone, etc., etc.
30 years of difference, as if we were teleported to another planet.
No, technology does not make us happier. Only the one who does not remember such a childhood has no idea how much more technology has taken than we have given us.
Indisputable advantage of technology is the ability to hear the voice of a loved one anywhere, anytime; send an e-mail in seconds and receive an answer; to see a close friend in a Skype near you; to work very quickly with the keyboard rather than a typewriter if you need to print text. Still, in the illusion, how much the technology gives us, we forget how they skillfully cling to our nets, intoxicate us, become a drug we can not do without, and before we feel we are already their prisoners.
The happiness of technology is short-lived. The latest phone model we've dreamed of months soon becomes another tedious acquisition and we're already targeting the next model. Better camera. More memory. There will always be something that will be more than what we already have. And this is the main reason we can not experience real and full joy. We are part of a vicious circle in which we have voluntarily and imperceptibly entered and from which there is no salvation.
Together with the introduction of newer technologies, man is also changing. What gave us pleasure on Saturday and Sunday seemed no longer enough to keep our attention. The movie is no longer so intriguing if it's not on a big screen and with deafening decodels in cinema. The book seems to be less valuable if we have not read a scrawny review of it from a book blogger, or if we have not uploaded a photo with the cover and a cup of coffee beside her. The Christmas and Easter cards have turned into pictures and emotions, and no other form of celebration is for us - the high-tech people. Walking in the park has become a celebration of locations and expressing feelings through the ready-made templates that facebook offers ("I feel blessed in the company of ...", "It's where you are, you drink what you are, eat what you are, feel, feel blessed, grateful, happy. "But is it really so?).
Technology has a habit of creating a deceptive world. They are rather the means by which man creates it. An illusion of happy marriage. An illusion of true friends. An illusion of a successful career. This scam is kept on its own. It does not matter who created it and whether someone believes in it - it just exists and is self-sufficient. That's why virtual life looks deceptively pink and sometimes one finds its escape in it, forgetting its real problems. No one will upload a picture of the moment he cries in which he is fired, dividing himself with his partner in which he is ill. It seems like taboo photos. Some tacit agreement among consumers that nothing should darken the illusion of happiness.
Technologies are part of the changing world. They are like the necessary evil that a person is obliged to get accustomed to. Nothing lasts forever. Everything flows and changes. But if one can be happy in a healthy and harmonious family without a smart phone or tablet, he can never be completely happy if he comes home alone if he has no friend with whom to share the good and the evil, even in his pocket to find the latest phone or tablet model. For, though, men are made of flesh and blood, with feelings, thoughts, with soul and heart. And while that is the case, the path to happiness is old-fashioned - the smile, the good word, the closeness of a loved one. It turns out that we, the high-tech people, need low-tech happiness.