In today’s world, the barriers of difficulty in presenting a masification of facilities are no longer broken, human beings, for example, need to facilitate certain tasks to make many of their goals and projects possible. Carry heavyweights from one place to another. Much of human history has been an effort to facilitate processes. The problem is, he ended up producing an army of facilitators.
First it was the industrial revolution, then the computer revolution, both phenomena have made the daily life of humans much faster, that is, they have managed to minimize the effort to carry out many daily activities that previously required more energy and time, for example, obtaining information. Word of mouth has been replaced by the conventional press and then by real-time information on the Internet.
“Conformism is the modern form of pessimism. -Antonio Escohotado-
One wonders whether all this really made life easier, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is now faster and requires less physical energy, but life has become so complex that mental illnesses are the ones that increase the most. At the same time, facilities have been introduced as a way to address this complexity.
The purpose of industrialization and information technology was not exactly to facilitate human life, its ultimate goal is to streamline and simplify production, it also ended up simplifying many of the tasks of daily life, but in essence, it did not become that. Much of this progress is more due to the concept of money than well-being.
In any case, the truth is that this principle that everything works easily has infiltrated our consciousness in different ways, the worst is the one that leads us to believe that ease and speed are desirable attributes, on the other hand the complex and the slow. are negative This way of thinking is the substrate of the facilities.
In its most positive and beneficial expression, science and technology have wanted to free us from mechanical tasks and those that require brute force. It is assumed that by speeding up tasks, such as washing clothes quickly or loading very heavy items more easily, we would all have more time to engage in more commendable tasks, which would add more to us. But it wasn’t done, or it was only done in parts and only for a few people. What increases is the attitude of contempt for effort.
We are increasingly using technology that makes our lives easier and, at the same time, we feel increasingly lost in the abyss of time ahead. In addition, we used to work long hours and today we continue to work so much or more.
A false ideal has been built: to eliminate problems. The idea that there is nothing positive about problems has become popular. Worse, many people imagine that there really is a life without difficulty, a world without obstacles.
They believe to the point where they end up frustrated because the day the problems go away never comes. The big paradox is that we’ve never felt before that we’d faced so many problems. Almost everything has become a problem, Eating too much or not having enough, having a job or not having it. Let’s build a life together or not and a very long summer.
Psychologically, facilities can have two sides: on the one hand, it would be a defensive response to what looks like a cluster of unresolved problems; on the other hand, it can also be a childish attitude, in which the individual wants to remain in a state that does not require sacrifices, efforts, or responsibilities, such as when he was a baby.
What these kinds of positions do not admit is that reality and difficulty go hand in hand, but beyond that, they do not understand that it is precisely the existence of difficulty that allows a person and all humanity to seek, find and evolve. The invention of fire was a response to an initiative to solve a problem and, when solved, the foundations were laid for a definitive step towards homo sapiens.
In general, facilities only accumulate and add problems, depriving people of the ability to self-assess, self-assess, and thus increase confidence in their own capabilities.
It also prevents them from enjoying the fullness of life: feeling worthy of who you are, what you have, and what you are capable of. Certainly there are difficulties that cannot be solved on their own, such as hunger in the world. There are also many others that can be fixed. What’s missing is self-confidence. Or self-love. Or both.
Images courtesy of Tatsuya Tanaka, John Holcroft.