I have been thinking about how comfortable we have become and how many things we now feel we need and cannot do without.
Look at how much has changed.
We had 8-track tapes. Then came cassette tapes, VHS, DVDs, personal computers, mobile phones, and all the technology that followed. Every new development made life more convenient, and we adapted to it.
We used to visit the bank. Now so much of banking is done online. Even withdrawing our own money can have limits.
Customer service is another example. We need help, but it can be surprisingly difficult to get a human being on the other end of the phone.
Our cars have also changed. They have so much technology and data built into them that there are things we cannot do ourselves anymore. We have to depend on someone else with the equipment and knowledge to deal with them.
Then there is food.
We buy almost everything we eat. Some of our fruit is seedless. There are no seeds to take and plant.
We also often have no idea what is actually in our food. We read the ingredients and see names we cannot even pronounce. Then we hear about food recalls and wonder what we are really putting into our bodies.
The more I think about it, the more I notice how many things we have moved away from doing ourselves. We have become accustomed to depending on banks, technology, online customer service, computerized systems, mechanics, and other people to grow, produce and process our food.
We have become accustomed to having almost everything done for us.
And I wonder where that leaves us.
Are we becoming so comfortable that we are no longer able to be self-sufficient?
Or, in some cases, are we simply no longer allowed to be?
That is the part that stays with me.
We have so many conveniences today. We have access to things previous generations could not have imagined. But with every new convenience, there seems to be another thing we no longer do for ourselves.
At what point does convenience become dependence?
It becomes something we cannot do without.
Then what happens?
What happens when the technology stops working?
What happens when the bank limits access to our money?
What happens when the car can no longer be repaired by the person who owns it?
What happens when we cannot grow the food we eat?
What happens when we cannot even identify what is in the food we buy?
And then there is another thought.
The other day I was listening to the radio here in Sweden. There was a discussion about how people can be hesitant to ask for help. One person suggested that perhaps this is because people know they can rely on the system when they need help.
That made me think about the difference between relying on a system and relying on people.
What happens when we become so used to having systems in place that we stop turning to family and friends?
We need people in our lives. We need to be able to ask for help, and we need to be able to give it.
Perhaps there is something important in needing one another that we should not lose.
It is almost as if we became so dependent on the various things that were supposed to make our lives easier that, somewhere along the way, we lost something of ourselves.
Perhaps we even lost something of our surroundings.
We became less connected to what we can do ourselves, less connected to where our food comes from, less connected to the people around us and, perhaps, less connected to one another.
Have we reached a point where we have given up so much of our ability to do things ourselves that we have no choice but to depend on others?
And at the same time, have we created a society where we depend so much on systems that we need one another less?
That is what makes me think about self-sufficiency.
Not going back to the past. Not giving up everything modern.
But asking ourselves how much we are still capable of doing on our own — and how much we are still willing to do for one another.
Perhaps the real question is not how much more convenient life can become.
Perhaps it is what happens to us, to our surroundings and to our relationships with one another when convenience becomes something we cannot do without.
