system collapse

This weekend I finished the upstairs repaint job that we started three months ago. Well, almost finished. There is a little touch-up work that needs done yet.

Since it was in the way, I removed the thermostat from the wall and figured we would just survive without air conditioning for an hour or two. I put the thermostat back on the wall the first chance I had, but the house didn't cool down. I found out later that the fan was powered on, but the air conditioner was not. This was due to a wire coming loose when I removed the thermostat. It took an emergency visit from our HVAC guy to diagnose and fix the issue Sunday morning.

Since this happened on one of the hottest days of the year it gave me some time to think about how tied I am to today's technology. There was a time not too long ago that people just tolerated hot weather because they had no choice. It did not matter if the weather made the eleven-month-old cranky, there was nothing that could be done.

When I hear this topic discussed, it almost always goes down the path of how people today could not handle life fifty, one hundred, five hundred, or one thousand years ago. When current technology fails we cannot handle the results, goes the argument, so this means we could not handle living in a world where the technology never existed. Since I know this, I started to wonder how true this perception really is.

How much of my reliance on technology is because I have grown soft from years of living in a world of microprocessors, grocery stores, television, and combustion engines? How much of my reliance on technology is selective because of the world in which I live?

As an example of why I rely on different types of technology, I think I rely on air conditioning because I am spoiled. I think I rely on a car for transportation for reasons other than being spoiled. I could not survive in today's world traveling by some other mode of transportation, such as a horse, so I have not learned how to care for and skillfully utilize a horse. Also, if I lived in an age without cars, I would not work or attend church more than a mile or two from where I live. I believe that losing air conditioning causes me to live like people in the past more than losing automotive transportation.

The question of the day, therefore, is how much of our reliance on modern technology is due to us being spoiled, and how much is out of necessity? I say we are necessarily spoiled.