Technology is reshaping the human creature. I have been warning about this for the past ten years. There is of course nothing that can be done on a large scale; we aren’t going to turn off smartphones or shut down the Internet. I’m not trying to suggest you “get off the grid.” However, you must awaken and start to reorient yourself to how you live your life now.
Want an example? Quit relying on GPS.
Four years ago I wrote “Over the years, both as a curious boy but also as a historian, I grew to love maps. Learning how to match what I see on paper with physically where I am is a fun game that I still play to this day. I love the moment that I can determine how a road twists and turns, especially in relationship to other roads I travel along. The problem is that we will lose this generally as a people. Imagine yourself in a strange location and not being able to connect to your supposedly all-knowing device. Now what? What if your life hangs in the balance? OK, that’s rare for most of us, but what if your next job or your raise hung in the balance?”
More recent research is showing that dementia can be linked to using their brains less and less. In one sense, dementia is not knowing where you are, let alone who the people are around you. Using GPS can be seen as a self-induced dementia. Ken Myers from the Mars Hill Audio expressed that very thought while speaking with his guest.
That guest, Nicholas Carr, mentioned that “if you never have to worry about getting lost, it means you never have to know where you are….what’s fascinating is that we are becoming people who never have to access our navigational skills…exactly at the time when scientists who look into the navigational sense of animals are finding these really complex inter-connections between one’s navigational sense and memory.”
He goes on to explain how one theory is that memory is deeply connected to navigation, even built upon the notion of remembering where safety or food is located. If we lose the ability to know where we are, we will most likely more quickly lose the ability to know who we are. We will lose our sense of place.
Years from now, perhaps within this century…perhaps far more sooner, experts will write about this time wondering how we could have let this happen. Around us in so many ways and places, we are losing touch with ourselves as humans…losing the very thing that makes us human. Decide today to engage your human brain. Turn off GPS and actually pay attention to where you are, to landmarks and how you got from one place to another.