Have Our Digital Devices Made Modern Life Less Interesting?

Despite technology providers’ claims to the contrary, is it possible that our digital devices have made modern life less interesting?

Our ever-present cellphones and their connection to GPS (the Global Positioning System) means we’ll never not know where we are—and most of our friends and family also know. And our constant sharing on social media means we probably know what each of us are doing at any given time as well.

We track our shipped packages mile by mile, and we can see a scan of our paper mail online before we go to the box to fetch it. Recently we learned that artificial intelligence can forecast the weather 15 days in advance with great accuracy. All areas of finance and medicine are also seeing the impact of large learning systems that quickly analyze mountains of data and reliably predict outcomes.

Amazing accomplishments, true—but I also wonder if something has been lost in the process. Where in our world is the element of surprise and delight?

There’s nature, of course. Getting outside with even a little bit of curiosity is guaranteed to surprise you. Creating original art can provide endless amounts of wonder if you let it. Oh, and children are full of surprises. Attending live worship at church can also be delightful. But this is a column about digital life.

For a while now I’ve been playing Wordle, the New York Times’ five-letter word guessing game, and it has me wondering how anything online and so-not-sexy like this game keeps my attention.

Part of its appeal is that there’s only one puzzle per day. Instead of the endless scroll of social media content, it takes only a few minutes, and once you solve it (or use up your six guesses) you’re done. It’s not asking any more of you, and you don’t need to give it more.

What if the people designing websites and applications would similarly limit the delivery of news or shares or videos? We’d be a little more surprised when we came back online. They’d never do it, of course, as the endless scroll of content includes ads, which make them huge amounts of money. So we have to take this into our own hands by limiting what we post and limiting the time we give to the endless stream of content coming our way.

I know that for many of us, giving up our devices would be almost impossible—probably even harder than giving up ice cream. But maybe we just need to stop eating bowl after bowl of content and find delight in it only every few days.