Mindful Technology
It occurred to me one night as I stared into my computer screen that the decision to NOT use technology is just as important, if not more important than any decision to use technology. Considering my life is facilitated by and largely built around the technology I use in my personal and professional life, this might seem a weird admission. But let me explain…
We humans talk a lot about balance in our lives. We attempt to balance spirit, family, work, home, health, and every other aspect of our lives that we value. Technology is no different. You’ve likely heard a lot about humans’ overuse of devices and too much screen-time. This is one aspect of an imbalance of technology in our lives. But those conversations often focus on entertainment and media technologies. There’s value in examining our use of… well… “useful” technologies, too.
Maybe there’s an app that we downloaded with good intentions. We started using it with vigor at first, setting up reminder push notifications, logging our milestones, and checking it frequently to ensure we were on track to achieve our goals. And then, slowly, the tool that we’d employed for our own benefit becomes burdensome. Tiresome to check and update. Push notifications get ignored. Worse still, the notifications we’d enabled to help move us forward end up making us feel regret or shame.
It may be that we weren’t entirely mindful when we began employing this technology, or that we lost that mindfulness along the way. It’s worth asking ourselves, have my values and priorities shifted? If they haven’t, we can recenter ourselves in alignment with those values and decide if the technology we employed continues to serve us. But if they have, we can leave that technology behind with gratitude.
Being mindful about technology sometimes, and maybe often, means saying “no, I won’t use that technology, because it doesn’t align with my priorities right now”. We realize the most benefit from our technology when we can mindfully opt in to it, knowing that there is a purpose and intention behind our decision to use it.
