Balance

I watched impatiently as my mom tried with the best of her ability to type in a simple address into the GPS. When I saw the street light turn green, I hastily said, “Here, Mommy, just give it to me. I got it. Just drive.” I took the GPS from her, typed in the address with ease, and resumed texting on my phone. As she turned her attention back to the road, she said to me, “I just do not understand how you kids know how to use technology so easily. When I was young, we did not need all of this electricity. Stop wasting your eyes on the screen! Look outside at all of the beautiful nature in the world around you.”

I put down my phone to look outside the car. Beautiful tall trees outlined the sky as we sped past a green flurry of grass. One second later, those tall trees turned into towering skyscrapers and the green flurry of grass turned into a smooth strip of pavement. The beautiful nature my mom told me to focus on had been replaced with the very technology she told me to take a break from.

Today, man-made structures and technology seem to have “taken over” our lives and replaced our appreciation of the natural beauty of the world. At least, that is what my mom and Odelia Kaly, the author of “Robot Apocalypse”, believe. In her essay, Kaly argues, “instead of these devices representing our collective progress and enhancing our quality of life, in the long run they are depleting our quality of life by inhibiting our ability to grow.” Kaly’s belief is that technology hinders our ability to be independent and value the true beauty of life around us.

On the other hand, my dad, who owns a cell phone technology company, believes the opposite. He thinks that technology has helped humans come very far. For one, he would not have made it to where he is today without technology’s progress giving him the opportunity to move to another country and start his company from scratch. He accredits much of his success and independence to his ability to understand technology. He believes that technology has been great to humankind and wishes to understand it even better.

Personally I do not think the same as either of them. I believe that there should be a balance between using technology and allowing it to control our lives. The two forces, technology and nature, are both so powerful that we seem to constantly feel the need to choose between the two. Some, like my dad, argue that we need to understand technology to the best of our ability and use it to better the quality of our lives. My dad believes technology has helped us become more independent and has given us the chance to further our abilities. Others, like my mom and Odelia Kaly, believe that technology is a negative presence in our lives, and we should work on connecting with nature and enjoying what it has to offer. Both my mom and Kaly would say that depending on technology prevents us from becoming more independent, because we rely on it so much that we will lose our sense of accomplishing our own tasks.

While both of these views have valid arguments to them, I have come to my own conclusion that we should combine technology and nature. Instead of allowing the two forces to “battle” it out, we should use both forces so that they can build off each other and work together in a way that will better our lives as a whole. We do not need to “pick” one side or the other. Humans do not need to decide whether technology is good or evil. We should focus on allowing technology and nature to coexist and letting them better each other. Nature can inspire technological inventions, and technology can help nature thrive. For example, the need for different energy sources has pushed humans to create different forms of energy intake, such as solar energy panels. These solar energy panels can in turn help the planet become a better environment for its inhabitants, as there is less of a dependency on fossil fuel resources. Another example is human medicine. Sicknesses and diseases have called for and inspired different medicines and cures to be created, and in return these medicines and cures that technology has created have allowed humans to live longer and healthier lives.

Technology and nature have certainly been two seemingly opposing forces. However, by looking out the window, you can see fields of green grass and tall trees in one section, and rows of pavement and skyscrapers in the next. But instead of seeing them as separate sections, we should focus on the bigger picture, which shows that these two forces, technology and nature, coexist and thrive off of each other to combine and create an even greater force that the two could not accomplish alone.