A christmas story about how technology does not change us

Solstice Christmas

Yesterday I went shopping to buy all our favourite foods for Christmas. I paid a visit to the supermarket, the bakery, the deli, the fruit & veggie store and accumulated many guilty pleasures. As well as all of those foods we rarely let our kids eat. Most times we go shopping our kids love to come to the door and inspect the bounty of what we have brought home. They inspect the bags while we are trying to carry them into the kitchen tripping under our feet, hoping to see we have bought them a treat. But this week was especially bountiful. The bags were filled with DNA enticing high sugar obesity causing treats. The kids were thrilled.

It got me thinking about when I was a kid. I remember the exact same excitement when my mother would bring home Christmas cakes and candy for us to munch on. My brother and I also tried to take the treats out of the bag before mum would notice. She always did, and would grab them back and tell us we have to wait until Christmas, although that week we would always get more than usual.

This has been going on for millennia. No doubt the hunters would return from the field with their success from the hunt. Excited children would gather and see what would be cooked on the campfire that evening. At those times of the season when the natural environment was plentiful, traditions would evolve and turn into reasons to celebrate. But the behaviour hasn’t change all that much, just where we hunt and what our campfires look like. Today we have cars and credit cards. They had spears and hunting wolves.

It turns out that most of what we do and appreciate is the same, our methods change, but our motives don’t. It’s something worth remembering with new technology, the best forms of which helps us achieve more efficiently what we already care about.

Merry Christmas and have a safe holiday.

New book – The Great Fragmentation – out now!