Why life feels increasingly out of control—and what to do about it

Life is getting harder with each click. Something has to be done. Maybe this is it.

Stress is today’s cancer. Nearly everyone is horribly stressed right now, no matter how well-off they are or aren’t. No matter if they’re living rural or urban. No matter what race or ethnicity they belong to. No matter the politics. No matter what groups or movements they identify with. The last decade has seen people turn bitter and angry like never before.

And it's by design.

Part of it is because of the many divisions among us I mentioned in the first paragraph.

So why do we have all these divisions, and why are we willing almost to kill another person who does not share them?

It’s simple, actually, so simple that it’s basically invisible, because it permits everything in our lives today. It’s tech.

No, I’m not talking about The Usual Suspects. I don’t mean we’re working too hard (though most of us are!) or that social media has become an echo chamber of hate and fear (though it is, and what I’m about to get to is largely the reason). Those simple articles—and there are so many of them—that tell you life is fast-paced and you have to take back your time by doing yoga, working out or hugging your cat are useless. They’ve been appearing for more than a decade and you’ll notice they’ve done nothing to alleviate the stress we’re feeling.

We’re feeling these stresses because we are no longer controlling any aspects of our lives.

Software is.

Invasion of the Body Sappers

Our devices, which over the last 20 years we have been, bit by bit, forced to rely on for practically everything, now control us, store up information about us, parse our wants into what they (the devices) think we should examine, and set our agendas. If you think that’s extreme, think again, or pay close attention to what happens every time you interact with electronic devices. We once used technology. Now we are used by it.

When we get onto the internet, the internet decides where we go and what we see, and we must click off, away or around something to get where we want to be. When we get software updates, they are optimized for what the companies offering them want us to do, without them even telling us, or allowing us to disable it fully.

Once, when laws were actually followed, even burying our “consents” in tiny out-of-the-way text would not have amounted to authorization. But Big Tech has Big Money, and they use it liberally on Big Legislators and Big Judges to score Big Wins against us.

Out of our control

Electronics are seeped into almost everything we do, and it all works the same way: We need permission to accomplish vital tasks, and more and more those electronics are being deliberately engineered to thwart our goals (until we pay more money for something we thought we already bought).

Those marvelous free apps we use in ever-increasing ways to manage our lives can be removed or altered without telling us. Even if you’re already bought and paid for your cartridge ink, printer companies can take it away from you. Even after you pay for a car, the automaker can throttle the horsepower or lock you out of your vehicle. This is how we live today—at the permission of our overlords…and we don’t even know, really, who these overlords are.

Over the last two decades, tech has played the longest “long game” possibly in history as they have made us fundamentally dependent on their products and then changed the rules on accessing those products. Not very long ago it would have been crazy to think we would have to give out so much private information to read an article. Or buy a lawnmower or a coffeemaker. Or set up our television. Now we do it all the time and don’t even find it strange.

As writer and social critic Deborah Eisenberg observed, "Before the dissolution of the East Block a tremendous amount of effort and work was put in by the Soviet government on getting people to spy on each other. We figured out how to get people to spy on themselves. It's marvelous. You don't have to pay anybody. All you have to do is sell somebody a phone."

Rage against the machine

This sort of forced lifestyle would affect anyone’s psyche. Which is, at the very least, one reason why people are so hateful and quick to turn to violence against one another today, even though superficially we all seem to have an easier life than we ever have before. We lose their minds—on planes, busses, and the highway. We engage in road rage, vandalism, and have completely lost touch with our humanity. That’s not our neighbor over there. That’s a “thing” that is getting in the way of our instant gratification—a gratification we have come to expect as our birthright from 20 years of increasing isolation with our gadgets.

Is there a solution?

There may be. But it's not a convenient or easy one. It depends on how far you're willing to go.

There are small numbers of people called “retro enthusiasts” or “vintage lifers.” They choose to live as much as possible in another time period—let’s sat the 1950s. They’ll own or rent a house from that period, one that has been minimally improved. They’ll drive a 1950s car, wear 1950s clothes, eat 1950s foods, listen to 1950s music, read 1950s books, limit their hobbies to what existed in the 1950s, etc. How far they take this depends on the individual and personal feasibility. But some take it very far.

They like the period they’ve chosen and feel more comfortable living then than in the present. That’s sort of what I’m proposing…going back to a time when our tech/life balance was far more sane.

Think back—It wasn't that long ago

Obviously it can’t be a complete divorce. For many of us, yours truly included, this poisonous software—there, I said it—is a part of our lives. It has to be. But there’s no reason we can’t minimize its footprint on our lives.

Say hello to that wonderful thing—your brain. Don’t use all the silly “tools” for writing, for planning, for thinking. You don’t need all the AI crap that rearranges your thoughts. Use your own brain to rearrange your thoughts. It’s called revision and it stimulates you to be a better worker. And you will find relief from your funk.

DO NOT read the comments on social media. They are engineered to both enrage and addict you. (Yes, this is easier said than done. I am living proof.

Need a ride? Call a cab, not a ride share. Stay in a hotel, not some stranger’s AirBNB. Watch a movie in a manner that isn’t streaming. Unhook your “smart” TV from the internet. Stop texting everybody and phone or visit. Read books (not ebooks)—those beautiful things . Walk into a coffee shop and strike up a conversation with somebody, never touching your phone the whole time. (If they touch theirs it’s your job to make the conversation so engaging they soon forget about the internet.)

Come back to the non-virtual world. You used to live there once.

Don’t buy cars that have subscription-based features. Don’t plug your coffeemaker into your internet. Ditch the “smart fridge” and “bluetooth toaster.” We had great fridges and toasters before teeth were blue.

Go shopping in person and use the internet only as a last resort. It’s more fun to touch, choose and bring home the object of your desire anyway. Ask someone their opinion of that restaurant instead of using Yelp, which is gamed anyway. And digital photos on your mantle? Really? Take a trip somewhere exciting, and never consult the internet as to what you expect to find there. Enjoy discovering it for yourself. I did this recently and the experience was rejuvenating, invigorating, indeed life affirming.

Tech has sold us "solutions" to problems we never had. And ruined our lives in the process.

I want to reiterate I am not dealing with the toxic stress of social media here. This is something different, taking back permission to live our lives as we wish from the demands of our devices. If we use them much less often, switch off their location services, stop feeding them our personal data, we will feel sane and more in control of our lives. Trust me on this.

I am not a Luddite. I still use technology. I still like technology. But I don't buy into the Silicon Valley narrative that technology is the balm to all ills. It's just a thing, like eggs or a ruler or two-sided tape. You don't need it for everything.

Sounds drastic, like detox.

It is. Like when you quit any addiction, each day is better. Steve Jobs limited his kids’ screen time and was well aware of the deleterious effects of the poison he hawked. Jeff Bezos has slow mornings around the breakfast table every day, where electronics are forbidden. And who were the first people to demand workers cut loose from their virtual meetings and meta-verses? The same tech moguls who sell that technology.

Our electronics habit reminds me of the 1960s, when everyone was puffing away on cigarettes. No one thought it odd that everywhere—in restaurants and airplanes and hospitals even—people thought it was natural to tinge rooms (and lungs) with bluish smoke that by then was known to be toxic. Anyone who demanded fresh air as a right was thought to be a little bit of an outlier. Today such a world seems impossibly alien. How could people smell like burnt cigarettes and live in a tobacco-stained world, and prefer it that way?

This is how we are going to look at this time in our lives someday in the future; they will wonder why we kept punishing ourselves with ever more expensive devices that were making us miserable, alienated, angry, and sad when we had the comfort and capacity to be happy and awestruck and joyous. Why indeed?