Many of us will remember the world without mobile phones. If we are separated from our mobile phone now it causes great distress. We cannot imagine going anywhere without it. If the government was to ban mobile phones imagine the uproar. Yet quite naturally not so long ago we all used to live without mobile phones at all.
Were we happy before mobile phones?
Most people imagine what it would be like to be without a mobile today and conclude that life without mobile phones is like that i.e. unhappiness.
But there was a big difference in the past: we didn't know about mobile phones. We neither had them, nor did we not have them! As a result they had no bearing on our lives at all. They neither made us happy or unhappy.
What is different between then and now is not actually the advent of mobile phones themselves: but rather the knowledge that there are mobile phones. It is the knowledge that makes us miss the phone, or reach for it in a situation, or want one.
Some people will argue that the phone meets an actual need which wasn't met in the past and so the past was objectively poorer. In other words people had to go without in the past and lived a more restricted life.
This is partly true. But it is not completely true. An example will do here. A friend bought his gran a smart new fast boiling electric kettle expecting this to make her happy. She found out some while later that actually gran did not like the kettle! The reason she had said was that where once she could put the kettle on the stove first thing and then gone to making toast, now the kettle boiled so quick that she couldn't do anything while she waited for it. So the "advance" messed up her routine. Bigger and faster are obviously not always optimal.
Returning to the main point of living a more restricted life. It is certainly true that in the old days (4 years ago when I got a mobile!) if I was delayed I had no way of phoning ahead, and sometimes in the past I remember it would have been handy. But I also remember that people behaved differently then. Firstly we made more fixed appointments that we tried to keep. Secondly if someone was late you just went along with the plan and they caught up. If the plan changed you left a message with someone like the bar. It was also possible to ask customer services to make announcements etc. There were unlimited ingenious methods of achieving what is done with a mobile.
The point is that people made do with what was available and lived their lives through that. There was never any undue unhappiness caused by not having a mobile phone. People were as happy with the technology then as people are with the technology now. The technology makes no difference!
It is arguable that the opportunities for unhappiness have actually increased! Losing our mobile phone or having it stolen is a cause of unhappiness that never existed in the old days. Having to pay the fare is another cost that never existed before. Keeping up with the endlesly complex hoops of ungrades and the absurdly complex pricing systems that exist in mobile world is another headache that never existed. For each satisfaction that comes with getting the new phone comes an equal array of headaches and dissatisfactions.
So its an odd thing thing this consumerist, economic view of life. It is like a rachet forever tightening with new advances that we can never do without. It is hard to imagine life without mobiles, internet, computers, cars, TVs, healthcare, houses, electricity etc (tho I'm doing my best) and certainly most of us couldn't stomach it. So all these things stand as opportunities for unhappiness in the modern world. Our ancestors who would have been ecstatic to find a strong stick to fashion a spear with had almost nothing to make them unhappy. Food, water, shelter, clothing, health, family life and maybe some shells or whatever they found pretty would have been all it took for them to live in bliss. Now look at what we have to achieve to reach the same state! And there is no going back - it takes a very hard discipline to wean us off these addictions. So we are sadly confined to the ever tightening screw of progress and economic growth, and all the labours that this entails.
Personally I've no problem with people struggling aimlessly for ever greater addiction to technology and material comforts, but the problem is that as life gets more expensive the environment is damaged as we have to extract more resources and labour harder on those resources. We have astronomical population growth so that the margins for development are shrinking all the time. Yet the rhetoric persists that growth and enslavement to materialism is the only way.
The world now leaps upon this band-waggon like children in a sweet shop. I remember seeing a Tibetan lama on TV saying that he wanted the electricity, the cars, the computers, the phones. It is not as argued these things that are the problem - but the fact that people start to base their happiness upon these things and then they become slaves. Like moths around the candle these attractive things will burn us if we get too close. Again I've no problem with people being burned by their foolishness - this is the path of growing up, I'm on it too and I've been burned many times! not least by "my muse". The problem I keep reiterating is the damage that the environment sustains as a result. Only when the last tree has been cut down and the last fish poisoned etc etc will white man realise he can't eat money ... or something like that... goes the famous Amerindian quote.
Mankind has been exploring what appears to be a cul-de-sac so far in its history. Someone time we need to get out and join the main stream of life again, back to the process of living and not dreaming. There are basic eternal truths that are inescapable; that we are born and we will die and that a life of love is Life and a life of hate is Death. There is little to add to this, and oneday by exhaustion of all the other possibilities it seems we'll realise that.
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