Don’t outrun your humanity in the rush to keep pace with technology
Looking back on 2025, it feels as if we’ve survived a monstrous mountain climb and can finally gaze down at the deep and treacherous valleys we’ve journeyed through this year.
As we pray the blinding glow of a new horizon that awaits us in 2026 promises good health for our loved ones or new career opportunities, one can’t help but feel bruised by the weight of change and chaos that have impacted our lives in this new modern age we’re navigating.
These days, productivity and profit have become two interchangeable words that are endlessly circling and feeding off each other through the advancements of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Now we’re at a stage where there are no excuses, no limits to how many reports we can summarise by copying and pasting a prompt.
There’s an endless amount of apps we can use to effortlessly edit our videos or retouch a photo with professional effects.
This spares hours of time compared to the days of booking appointments, paying and waiting for this service to be done by hand and yet it appears we’ve forgotten the beauty of patience.
It’s a privilege and an art in itself to receive a hand carved wooden sculpture you bought when one thinks of the sleepless nights, the fingers that endured cuts to produce that lifelike artwork.
You could sense the sweat and stress that went into these paintings, the care and delicate touch to try and capture a feeling or a moment frozen in a misty memory.
Now you’ll find yourself being turned away from your bank and told to use your app, after you were queuing for a query you had about your finances.
The convenience and comfort our cellphones have brought us, are slowly eroding the times we spend speaking face to face when we can simply “video call”.
Human interaction is precious, important and needs to be protected and nurtured.
The more our eyes slide with the rhythm of our scrolls on our screens, the more they feed and become addicted to our content and algorithms.
We can become attached or victims to our ego, numbing our ability to understand each other in the pursuit of curating a “perfect world” where only we reign and other thoughts or ideas are seen as threats or volatile.
Whether your utopia is encapsulated with thoughts of bigotry, sexism or tolerance and liberty, we run the risk of misunderstanding or refusing to “see” ourselves in each other.
As we all know the French Revolution became a bloody nightmare where potential traitors faced the guillotine. This Reign of Terror involved mass executions and arrests for those opposing the new government that “fought for the people”.
History tells us around 20 000 men and women were killed – either shot, stabbed or drowned, during this reign, with the vast majority of deaths being ordinary citizens not the rich and elite.
When vengeance and fear rule it can blind our reflections like a mirror in a steam room, we can become barbaric and cruel, normalising violence as a “means to an end”.
As the world and society keeps trying to quicken its pace with technology’s innovation, let’s not outrun our humanity in this process to survive the stress of being “left behind” in the fourth industrial revolution.
