Technological distortion

Sometimes it is difficult to do properly what your heart and mind deems the correct course of action in a given moment. You would think that would not be the case, since doing the right thing would seem to imply an action which posesses the most favorable ratio of advantages to disadvantages. Yet so it often proves that the right choice is also the most difficult.

Why so? Perhaps it is because the right choice is in part "right" due to the long-term advantages that it offers at the expense of short-term costs. In an age where technology has made gratification habitually instant in many things, doing the "right" thing in the long-run could render long-term thinking less natural than simply appraising the present as the only moment that matters. Perhaps techonology has, by degrees, altered a great many people's appraisal of the short-term costs of difficult choices, so that such pain seems unusually great in comparison to some foggy notion of future prosperity and peace of mind. Day after day, more research suggests that the average person's time before becoming bored has dropped from about 30 minutes in the 1950s to somewhere around a minute. I wish I could cite the source, but reviewing some relavent literature would probably bear this out. Waiting two minutes to allow a computer to load has become a burden for some computer-users. Likely this could contribute to raising the perceived costs of making a right choice that would yield long-term benefits.

According to such thinking, the actual cost of doing the right thing is not any higher than it has ever been. Rather, the nurture that technology provides has the potential to alter the ways in which techonology-users perceive and think about such costs, and as a result it can become more difficult to look past short-term gain or feelings for the sake of long-term benefits. Given this, it would seem quite important for people to consider the effect of technology on the ways they perceive costs and benefits in their daily lives. Losing the ability to wisely discern a prosperous course over the long-term could have potentially damaging effects on a person's, a family's, and indeed a nation's ability to provide for its prosperity, health, and general happiness.

One of the founding principles of the United States emphasized the freedom of a person to choose such things as provide for their, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The freedom to choose our course as we deem suitable and right naturally requires that such judgment remains sober and capable through the generations. What shall we do if such judgment is compromised by prosperity and technological development? How shall we choose the right course when modernity increasingly skews the costs? This, I believe, is one of the great challenges of living in a modern society today. It seems likely that our's and our friends' prosperity and happiness will depend on our efforts to see through the potentially distorting lens of contemporary society.