How Technology is Making Me Lazy

Last updated on 2014-09-07

A couple of months they installed new electronically activated faucets at work

Nothing special happened at once… but after a couple of weeks I started noticing something very interesting. Whenever I went to public bathrooms, I would find myself standing in front of the faucet and waiting for it to turn itself on, regardless of the type of faucet that was in front of me. This obviously happened for just a couple of milliseconds, but it was enough to become noticeable.

WOW! How little it takes for us to become lazy! And the same can be said for many other technologies: I haven’t memorized a phone number in a lot of time, using my phone as my portable memory. Navigating from one place to another is done using Waze, and “In Waze we Trust”. Everything that I must do is on my calendar, otherwise I forget.

So technology is making me lazy. But is it making me dumber? I don’t think so. Sometimes I do think that it is reducing my ability to remember things (memory can be improved with training). But on the other hands, it leaves more brain cells free to do more complex and interesting things. So as all things in life, it is something that we must balance.