Wednesday 27 December 2017

What If We Treated Problems with Our Bodies and Minds Like We Treat Our Tech?

Fran and I live on opposite sides of the Atlantic. We use technology. A lot. Without it, we couldn’t do our friendship at all. Indeed, we would never have met. Fran has a Windows laptop and an iPhone. I have a Samsung Android phone, a PC, and a Chromebook. I like Googledrive for sharing documents and cloud storage. Fran prefers Onedrive and her iCloud. Connecting might be simpler if we agreed to use the same technologies and platforms but we get by, and learn a lot in the process.

One way or another technology is an integral part of our everyday lives, whether at work or at home, or out and about in the world. Computers. Phones. Cameras. TV. WiFi. Internet banking. Shopping. Entertainment.

We have some basic (and probably incorrect) ideas about how it all hangs together. We want it to work most of the time and grumble when it doesn’t, but we accept there are going to be difficulties and do our best to work around them.

When problems and complications arise, we don’t think worse of ourselves or each other for having them. We talk to each other. We reach out for assistance, confident someone we know will have had similar experiences or know someone who might be able to help. We’ve all had our home WiFi crash on us for no apparent reason, our phones die at crucial moments, or our home printers refuse to cooperate with us. We empathise, offer support to one another. We share fixes and workarounds. We understand. Because tech is really, really, complicated. It would be silly to expect it to work perfectly all the time.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had the same attitude to our bodies, emotions, and brains? Because if our phones, computers, and TVs are complex we are gloriously more so.

 

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