Sometimes I wonder if major technological breakthroughs are a product of boredom.
Tech nerds and engineers looked at a perfectly good bag phone in 1992 and thought, “ok, now what?”
“Hey, I wonder if we could make that fit in our pocket?”
So they invented baggy jeans that people wore hanging down to their…umm, just above their knees. Flip phones were next, of course.
Bored with that and tired of carrying cameras in their fanny packs, the nerds (on breaks from playing Dungeons and Dragons) came up with the genius notion of taking pictures with the telephone device.
And the rest is history. Now no one hardly talks on it all.
People don’t talk much period. We text. We email. We update our Facebook statuses and like each other there and on Instagram, but we don’t talk. We have 439 friends on social media that we haven’t had real face to face time with since the last episode of Friends.
It may be no surprise that suicides have increased by 20% over the past decade.
There’s something that the nerds can’t improve on. They can’t engineer a replacement for it.
Intimacy.
It was God’s idea that this human need be fulfilled in relationship with other humans.
It was pretty clever thousands of years ago. And it still is.
Why don’t you text an old friend an invitation for lunch?
Onword and Upwords by Dennis Brady 