Does Our Increasingly Mechanized World Cause Us You Feel Alienated?

for better things and places somewhere else is rational in all of us, but should not overwhelm us to the point that where we are presently may be better and is the place where we belong and truly makes us happy. (Donkin 298-99). The drive for economic growth has led to disastrous results as workers have less leisure time, and companies have developed a dog eat dog persona leading to stock market crashes, employee contractions, and other deleterious effects. (Donkin 303-07). Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American wrote about how work has minimized the leisure time for most working people in America. (Donkin 302). The great Mexican artist illustrated in his murals that the search of a better life ended up as being confined as prisoners of the exploitation within the automobile factory (Donkin 301). Computers and new technology has changed the way we live is comparable to the change brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Cell phones, the internet, tablets voice mail, and e-mail has transformed the way people communicate and has changed the landscape of how people work. (Donkin 305-07). Martin Luther King Jr. warned that while technology was advancing, the spiritual and moral ways people are treat each other were being diametrically opposed to each.

As quoted by Csikszentmihalyi that “people often end up feeling that their lives have been wasted, and instead of being filled with happiness their years were spent in anxiety and boredom” (608). He added that despite the comfort of today’s modern living; the contentment does not seem to apply in

Most people in today’s society have been affected by how simple technology makes our lives. Considering they’re hand held computers, it makes sense. All of this technology at our fingertips has also brought upon its negative outcomes. Technology has created a false world that we consume ourselves with on a daily basis.

The world is constantly changing and maneuvering to reimprove itself for the better of the people, or so one may think. There are so many new innovations and forms of technology that are constantly changing. “Look here’s the iPhone 8” and then the next year “look here’s the iPhone 9s plus.” A person would think that as society gets older, it just continues to get better and better; however, in many instances it has been shown to be questionable if today’s society has changed and reimproved at all. Every day on the news there is something wrong with the world like a shooting, or a plane crash, or some sort of harmful violence. Technology has been seen to worsen issues as well as improve them. Advertising has been able to spread through technology

Dorothea Brande said, “There are seeds of self-destruction in all of us that will bear only unhappiness if allowed to grow.” Today’s society is mainly focused on technology, in being approved by others, and other things that without doubt lead it to destruction and failure. Most people in our society think of themselves as happy, yet it is the complete opposite. Humans these days are simply miserable and torn between work, technology and many other things that separate them from true happiness. Too much technology has consumed people’s brains and most of the times makes them lose the capability to think for themselves, communicate with others and it also leads to laziness. The lack of family relationship and communication has ruined most families and has redefined the traditions and the meaning of a family. Too much conformity has redefined what is acceptable for people to do and not do just to be accepted. Just like the society in Fahrenheit 451, today’s society is equally self-destructive.

Most of the time we go through our lives daily on a set routine: Wake up, go to school/work, come home, have some possible leisure time, then go to bed and get ready for the next day. However, how many times have you ever just looked around at the world we live in today and thought about the amount of items we as humans have created to better our lives. Probably not much because these things that make our lives easier cause us to become trapped inside the world of technology and ultimately, the things that were designed to assist our lives, create more problems.

Happiness and comfort occur when one has improved their state from a prior reference point; it is not a stationary site or goal, it is an ongoing endeavor. The Brave New World has eliminated hardships and as a result paused emotion and essentially removed happiness from

This happiness is derived out of ignorance, out of pure shallowness and superficiality. It is not the real happiness a person would experience by overcoming life’s trials and tribulations, because they simply have none. This is a warning from the author that if people continue to be as wasteful and materialistic as they are, they will become more ignorant and naive-- living life on hedonistic whims of meaningless and trivial pursuits and never doing anything particularly useful.

Modern technology continues to advance, creating negative effects on people’s emotional happiness. Although the simplicity of life has changed as time has evolved and individuals are mentally trained to alter their social perceptions based on

While Anna Akbari author of the essay “A Personal Guide to Digital Happiness” affirms, “One question I keep coming back to: How does technology affect our happiness? As Albert Einstein remarked, "Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it." (2) So how do we make sense of this technology and can it make us happier people? Akbari expounds, that she started this quest to find happiness in the digital age with online dating. One of her dates was with an anorexic emo guy with pink hair and full of angst. On their first date, he informed her that he was “kind of a depressive guy”, so she tried to empathized, stating that she had people close to her who have suffered as well and that she understood. “He then looked at me and stated firmly, with disdain, "No. You cannot understand. I've met people like you. You're one of those happy people." I've never forgotten that scathing accusation -- that I had the nerve to be happy. I'd never thought of people in those terms: "happy" or "not." Since that date I've grown increasingly obsessed with the concept of happiness, and judging from the abundance of literature being published on the topic, I'm not the only one: there are books to tell you how to be happier at work, how to

Technology is a way that all six billion people in the world can communicate with each other. We can follow people from all over the world on Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, and many more social media sites. Technology gives us ways to communicate with celebrities, your child that you recently sent off to college or the world, and your friends and family who live in different states than you. Technology in video games allows us to play in multiplayer mode with our friends, while being at our own houses. New advantages with technology is that we can text, call, and use the internet all on one device. Also, technology plays a great role in the medical field. I do not think technology isolates us from society, I think that technology connects us with one another in a unique way.

everyone’s individual jobs relies on another’s, whether it be in a big or small way. Therefore, as alienation pulls individuals in society away from each other creating a conflict, solidarity has them pull together to create a consensus.

In recent decades, the world has changed dramatically. The life of modern people has become uncertain, fast and unsafe. Everyday life is becoming more and more complex, stressful and demanding.

Since the beginning of time, the human population has strived to live simpler lives. We have spent generations, creating innovations within technology to ensure our lives would always be more simplistic than those who lived centuries before us. People now have the ability to update their Facebook status’, map the human genome to target strands of DNA that can be disastrous to one’s health, send out amber alerts nationwide, and create plants that are resistant to pesticides. Many fields, such as medicine, law enforcement, and entertainment have benefited greatly from advancements in technology which has inevitably changed the way society operates. However, with the abundance of technology available, society has developed an unhealthy relationship where we now rely on technology too heavily. Technology has rendered our minds incapable of the ability to play, communicate, and live our lives in the moment, despite its positive additions to our society.

Myers, Courtney. "Are new technologies making us happier?." TNW Network All Stories RSS. N.p., 30 Oct. 2011. Web. 6 Dec. 2013. .