> In Western society there are always two lies operating at once. The first lie is that technology will save us and fix everything and is the ultimate path, the second lie is that throwing away all of our technology, being as close to nature as possible, blah blah will also save us and fix everything.
I don't think it's unfair to say that I would benefit from one less day of using my computer per week and exchange it for going outside and reading at the park or going on a hike or biking. Or that abstaining from social media but still having access to online content would benefit my brain.
To me, it's not like M&M Peanuts, where I can either have no M&M Peanuts because none exist in the house, or can consume entire bag in one sitting because some are in the cabinet. Instead, I think it's fair to say I should be more open about being discriminating on the technology we use instead of naively accepting every new hot thing as being good for us as long as we have the discipline to moderate.
I know of people who basically lost years of their lives to World of Warcraft, which is entirely why I never ever touched that game with a ten foot pole because I know my susceptibility to those games. It's also why I deleted Facebook/Twitter, because I know I easily get hooked onto news and that hundreds of designers/engineers are working on captivating my brain in the name of ad revenue.
In a sense, I feel like we just all need to be honest about our own limits and acknowledge that technology has a drawback that is not insignificant. Knuth may have seemed like a luddite, but given how many people are hooked onto news/social/media/e-mail/Slack, his hard stance on email was perhaps more wise than most of us realized.