Progressive regression

The world moves too fast for my liking; I keep up of course, it's just that I feel in doing so I am not living the life I would like; It's almost like I am being swept along by the wind of change, against my will, and with no real choice but to go with it.

The world has changed so quickly and in only a couple hundred years we've gone from a fairly simple life where most things are within our control, to a complex one where the most simple of things are taken out of our hands. I understand, it's progress, however there are times, many times, where I feel that what we call progress is not necessarily the best for us.

The ability to grow and raise our own food is largely unnecessary; Yes, there are some who continue to do so, the few, not the many. We are losing the ability to cook for ourselves; Yes, we know how to dial pizza, press buttons on a microwave, but cook? Not so much. We cannot often mend our own clothing, fix our household items when they break, or make new ones. We can't fix our cars, cultivate crops...Even having our own opinion is taken out of our hands through media propaganda, social media streams, corporations and governments.

I find all of this troubling.

I live in a first-world country and am fully-aware that there are people still doing the things I mention above through lack of options; I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the billions of people who cannot, or will not do so. I believe we have lost some very valuable core skills in our pursuit of progress and i don't see them coming back anytime soon.

I wish it would slow down, the world. I wish a thatch-roofed cottage, cottage garden and a few animals was a reality for me but it is not. Yes, I could sell up and make it happen, but realistically, for reasons I'll not divulge here, it is not achievable. It's not viable in a world that values the next iPhone over baking bread, the latest computer game over working with ones hands or Facebook over real communication. We are so clever. But are we?

I wonder if the world will ever outsmart itself. We have the answer to everything at our fingertips; Right or wrong Google has a response, but we are largely unable to perform the most basic of things. good or bad? I don't know. Will it come full-circle? Will we be able to arrest the decline into incompetence in the very things that lifted us up in the first place.

"Progress is the mother of problems."
- G.K. Chesterton