Tech Exhausts Me, But I’m Addicted To It

Staring zen into an emerald field of grass, interrupted by a craving need for technology…

Welcome to the pity party. You must be reading this because it resonates with you. Of course, it does. If you happen to be a human with at least a smart-phone in your pocket, you already get what I’m talking about. You know yourself all too well the feeling. You’re just here to compare and contrast your conflicted feelings with mine. Perhaps you’re even a software engineer like me. Or a tech blogger. Also like me. My Zoom app status says, “judiciously pressing buttons for a living”. It’s true. For you, for me, for many of us. If literal pennies would drop from the sky at every button press, we’d be living in a pretty dangerous and noisy world. While literal coins aren’t going to bash my head in, it’s still noisy. Being in tech, loving tech, as exciting as it is, it’s still deafeningly noisy, and every so often all I need is the quiet moments between me, the breeze blowing through the grass and maybe one other human next to me. Or a dog. Or both. Apart from that, nothing. No screens to look at, no buttons to press, no pings to listen for. Just pure quiet in its universe-intended form.

Pretty poetic from a software engineer, innit? It’s nothing new, though. I met nature at an early age, at my late grandfather’s house. Sitting at the top of a pretty tall hill, just below the extended garden dominated by a natural well in the middle, the serenity of nature of near-motionless existence was only perturbed by the occasional harmless lizards and garden snakes hunting for things far too small for my universe to perceive. In many ways, just like in “Horton Hears a Who”, we were in very different worlds, and the two, while intricate parts of each other, just barely touched.

Peace and quiet. We all crave it, yet we keep finding novel ways to make it increasingly impossible.

We coined terms like getaways and retreats, built multi-billion dollar businesses around them as expensive plasters to the problem we ourselves created — a world that’s no more dominated by natural wells, but technology.

Yet as inorganic as that may sound, the same 10-year-old child, just days after communing with nature, excitedly took apart his first boombox received from his father to inspect and understand everything inside. To discover where the sound came from, what the potentiometer was doing and how it was doing it. That magnetic tape-head? Well, it was no mystery anymore, and from that day onward, no screw was unturned until that kid, later teenager and adult, didn’t get to understand what made everything work. That old Russian boombox became a walkman, a discman, the tamagotchi, the handheld Chinese Tetris knock-off, and finally the computer — a great-grandfather of the very machine I am typing these words on.

As I found myself increasingly pulled into the magical world of technology, inevitably, I lost the ability to say no. The desktop computer became a more powerful desktop computer, which subsequently became a laptop, then several laptops. For the last two decades, I had at least two computers, always ready to rock n’ roll. The concept of not having a backup computer paralysed me and I still think it probably would, but I have gotten so accustomed to having at least two, that the panic never sets in anymore. I guess that’s a type of peace of mind too, when you think about it. 🤷‍♂️

And then, of course, there’s everything else. The iPad, the iPhone — and an earlier but functional backup phone just in case — the Apple Watch, the smart bulbs, the smart kettle, the HomePods, the mice, the keyboards, the cables, the AirPods… do I need to go on? It’s a silicon flat, is what it is. And I’m barely even hoarding anything.

I love it all, I want it all. But only part of me… The other me is still hoping to sit carelessly in the grass, staring into what’s either a sunrise or a sunset, being so oblivious to the passing of time, that it doesn’t even matter. But it does matter, because the iPhone is set to wake up at 9AM, at which point it’s notifications-galore. From pings to pongs, rings and vibrations, it’s a cacophony of electronic noises letting me know the world is alive. And I get hungry. Not for food. For information. For technology. I check my Medium notifications, my stats, then my emails, text messages, I ask Siri for the weather and while we’re at it, to turn the kettle on. I press the button on the remote to open the blinds, the sun is indeed up, and my world is buzzing. It’s a different world. An often exhaustingly dynamic yet exciting realm of technology, where I have now gotten to the point of programming the very computer I was taking apart years ago.

And it strikes me…

Our eternal fight between these two needs and wants is a pre-determined human instinct. We need peace and nature because that’s where we come from, and we want technology because curiosity is part of the human condition. That’s, where we’re going.

I’m Horton, and I’m also the Who. As I embrace technology, I hear the coastal sunrise walks of Dublin calling, the Ticknock Forest and the empty beaches, but the moment I’m there, technology finds a way to break through the quiet embrace of nature, remind me that I am just as curious as I am in need of nature and the two must coexist.

Without Hyde there is no Jekyll and without Horton there is no Who. Without either or the other, there is no story. No story of me. In this version, in this universe. In my universe.

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.