Overload:

How our technology-inundated culture might cause depression and other medical problems down the road.

The new iPhone 3G. It’s a phone, an iPod, an internet connection - and anything but necessary. Yet people from across the world will stand in line, search until bleary-eyed, and shell out money they don’t have for this latest gadget. In a couple of months, a new toy will erupt onto the scene, and the process will begin again.

The epidemic is as old as time itself: discontentment spurred by a constant need of amplified entertainment.

Physicians call it by another name - Anhedonia.

Anhedonia is a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts, usually linked to depression.

Our technology-inundated culture makes falling prey to this dissatisfaction very easy.

From first light, children take their lessons from the television. They grow into teens and adults who allow electronic gadgets to constantly distract them from nature, and each other. Society has forgotten the sound of silence.

The age-old agrarian lifestyle of quietness, simplicity, and community hardly exists anymore. We have swapped simplicity with fast-paced razzle-dazzle gadgets, and the trade was not worth it. Instead of allowing the technology train to carry us away, we should consider that most luxuries, and many so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to our success.

“ To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust,” - Henry David Thoreau.