An amazing time period to be living in!

First off I need to acknowledge I haven't posted anything to this particular blog in over a year and a half. One reason is that I have been focusing on my personal journal/blog which I keep private. Second is that I went through a ton of health issues over the past year and have switched up priorities a little bit. Third is that I really feel as though I need to hold off on public writing until I'm a little more informed and have something of value to say. But I don't know...I can't wait until I'm 80 years old to voice my opinions. So I got a little more work to do inside my head...

So here we are, year 2012. A lot has changed in the past 30 years...so much that one blog post could never do a very good job at describing the advancements in technology and everyday living. Yet I believe we're still very much in an early stage of development. New ideas are going through massive experimentation. Paradigms are changing frequently. The way we think about the world around us has been turned inside-out, and outside-in. There's so much we don't yet know, and to me that is the beauty of it all! It's like when the New World was first settled...we didn't really know what lay beyond the shores. And as of today, we haven't progressed beyond the shores of the Information Age.

We like to think of ourselves as intelligent. But we can only do what we know how; and right now we don't know very much in the grand scheme of things. Even in our most recent generation, certain concepts and devices were embraced by the masses, only to die out quietly into the night. I could think of many examples, one of the most prominent being video rental outlets such as Blockbuster. Others showed promise in the beginning stages, but the technologies did not mature in ways we had hoped they would (alternative fuel vehicles, for instance). And we're continually finding new uses for technologies which are already developed, such as the ability to program home appliances with a mobile phone.

What does this all mean? Where will all this lead to? What will the end game look like when everything we encounter is so perfectly optimized there's nothing left to figure out?

In a sense, we're already there. Many of us live in an environment which allows us to live without struggle or even modest physical demands on our bodies. And we've seen the collateral toll it has taken. Artificially controlled environments have been created to challenge us physically (and mentally) even when our technologies we strive to create are designed to reduce these challenges. Take for example a fitness center with a rowing machine... We made many advances in technology so that rowing a boat was no longer necessary. We loved it and still do. Not many people aspire to the physically grueling task of rowing a boat down a river. So what do we do? A rowing machine is created to simulate the effects. Same for the exercise bike and most any other apparatus found in a gymnasium. Crazy stuff.

But I digress...the ride we're on today is quite fascinating. And the more I delve into the history of our civilization the more I feel a part of everything.