While I sit here at my laptop listening to the simulated sounds of whales to ease my technology-induced nerves, my chair massager buzzing away those pesky lower-back aches brought on by hours on the treadmill, I find myself wondering… have we gone a little overboard with the modern conveniences? With so many of our daily activities becoming simulated these days, are we really living anymore, or just pretending to?
Take natural childbirth, for example. Stop and think for a moment how strange it is that this is just an option. “I want to have my child naturally,” says my 8-month bursting-at-the-seems mother-to-be friend. Like many women these days, she is carrying a ridiculously large fetus. They are saying that this rash of large babies is due to all the chemicals in our food. Chemicals that lower our cholesterol, increase our vitamin intake, decrease our fat intake, and, wouldn’t they like us to believe, simulate a full hour of cardiovascular exercise. As I’m staring at this veritable basketball she intends to squeeze out next month, she tells me confidently, serenely, “I want to be alert for every part of it. I want to be able to watch my child come into the world.”
That’s all well and good, admirable and noble. But is she crazy? What about the pain? “Women have been doing this for centuries and centuries,” she points out. “I want to be a part of that.”
“For centuries and centuries women have been crouching in the dirt mashing cornmeal with a rock,” I say. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to.” My grandmother delivered my mother the old-fashioned way – with a lot of drugs – and even smoke and drank through her pregnancy, and my mother turned out just fine. A little more annoying than most people, but I don’t think that has to do with how she was born.
Have we swung so far towards a simulated world that we are now actually starting to swing back the other way? Natural childbirth, organic foods (it was news to me that the vegetables I have been eating were inorganic)… a return to the lives our ancestors lived in the Jean Aeul era – ancestors who, I may point out, had a life expectancy of about 10 minutes and communicated by grunting and scratching their armpits.
Fortunately we still have a lot of popular simulated practices to keep this outdated concept of living at bay. For example, if I tried to ride a bike that actually went somewhere I think I would become too disoriented to exercise. Not only do we have the treadmill to prevent us from running too far away from where we parked the car, we now have an even more advanced machine to simulate running itself, something easier on our knees and backs. Our ancestors must have had to give each other back rubs all the time what with all that running after mammoths and away from saber tooth tigers and such. But we no longer have to worry about the running, the tigers or the mammoths - thanks to modern technology, zoos, and the fact that the mammoths died out, probably because their big huge knees hurt so much from all that running away they did from our ancestors.
We have video games that simulate flying, fighting and even dying. Modern technology allows us to die dozens of times a day! Why, when I was a kid, it was pretty damn painful to die. So painful, in fact, that we pretty much avoided it as an after-school activity. The closest we came was poking each other with a stick and declaring, “You’re dead!” to which you could always answer, “Nuh-uh!” Our ancestors chasing those mammoths had even worse odds. If they were unfortunate enough to catch a tusk to the head, there were no “extra lives” or “do-overs” in their future. Now the most you can expect is a bit of carpal tunnel and maybe a thumb callus.
But forget dying. There are far more impressive conveniences thanks to modern technology. You can date via the internet, check out your own groceries with an extremely cheerful, computerized cashier who never dispenses the wrong change, and bank at an ATM whose one-eyed camera keeps a maternal watch over your newly acquired cash. When your phone line goes kaput you sigh with relief when the phone company says, “Oh, we can fix that remotely. We won’t need to dispatch a technician.”
Despite the seeming convenience of all this advancement, I guess it’s still possible that some day soon the natural childbirth and organic foods way of thinking will catch on, and we’ll have to go back to massaging, running, birthing, fighting and dying for real. Or, God forbid, talking to each other again.
I hope not. I don’t really like people all that much. But to be on the safe side, I’m practicing my hand gestures and sharpening my weapons made of animal teeth, just in case.
© 2004 Karen A. Bertiger
