21st Century Inventions We Depend On
Recently, on a drive from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, my phone died, with all of my contacts in it, and I ran out of gas. I was zipping to meet friends who I was supposed to drive to Las Las vegas with where I would be getting paid a lot of cash to work at an event. The gas station I proceeded to go to did not accept credit cards and these folks did not know where the next gas station was, nor could I look it up on the web on my broken telephone and I was standing there pondering “who doesn’t accept credit cards?!” and after that I realized…pretty much anyone earlier than the 21st century.
If that gas station had simply accepted credit cards, I wouldn’t have spent twenty minutes looking for an additional gas station. If my telephone had worked, I could have used the internet on it to discover the nearest gas station and I may have been able to contact my pals and tell them I was only running a bit late, they may not have left without me and I may have made the money that I really needed that month.
It was then, standing in a almost abandoned gas station, holding my dead phone which I realized that entire situation—all of that—was created and decided by my dependency on 21st century inventions. In no other century would any person have had so much riding on anything so easily breakable.
There was a time when people always carried cash—when using money you didn’t physically possess was not even a concept people could understand. It was additionally a time when you could barely inform your close friends the dead on time you would arrive somewhere. You would give them more of a “window”—and a large window of time at that—simply because the speed and reliability of transportation could seldom be calculated with such accuracy.
A video I stumbled across recently in which a Los Angeles vocal coach was speaking to a student all across the world about some singing techniques, and he mentioned it would not have been achievable without the Internet, made me realize just how considerably everybody depends on these 21st century innovations for essential issues in life—like an income! And, on a different note, pursuing one’s passion, like becoming a better singer.
Today, the computer breaks down, the telephone dies, the gas station doesn’t take credit cards, and you could possibly be short on your rent check (as I was right after missing that gig in Las Las vegas!)
A living might be made and lost in an instant—a cyber glitch. By no means before in history was it so fragile.