Your life without a computer: what does it look like?
I wrote about this topic in 2017 https://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=778.
Here’s an excerpt from my piece
Suppose there was some solar storm, worldwide blackout, super lightning strike or something like that, that shorted out computer power supplies. And to make this interesting, your tablets and phones, once the battery drained, couldn’t be recharged, so no longer worked. What would happen?
The biggest implication would not be whether or not you could handle the lack of computers, but the worldwide implication of what computers do to run our lives. Think of national defense, traffic control (both on the ground and in the air), many of our appliances, communication, as well as our electronic health records (which are mandated by law) use computer technology. These are issues that would be catastrophic. Our own little problems of having no computers would not be the problem, true survival might be the bigger issue.
So let’s scale back on our computer shutdown issue. Suppose all of the global things do work, it is only our personal devices that are affected. Could you live without them, and if so, for how long.
I have an advantage over the large population. I’m old enough to have lived quite a long time prior to all of these things being invented. I got my first computer (Apple //e) in 1983. I was 33 years old. So I have been able to survive without computers through some of my adulthood years. Things like writing and research and reading books, I would be able to do without much difficulty. I would definitely miss the speed and amount of information that I can retrieve and of not being able to have the books and writing I’ve done always at hand. I would probably take more walks outside and put more energy into things like writing and storytelling. Unfortunately most of my life I have been around televisions so I would still watch TV unless that was gone too. In that case, I might suffer a bit more withdrawal. But I think I could do it.
One could ask, that if I thought I could do it, would I be willing to go cold turkey for a length of time, such as a week to prove it. The answer would be, “No”. I have no need to prove myself.
What about the rest of you? A large number of you have only known life with computers and technology. Your lives are built around its use. Unless you are living in some Amish country or anti-tech commune, your experiences without technology are very limited. What would you replace your gizmo’s with? How would you spend your time? Could you do it, for any length of time?
What’s interesting is that I’m not the only person to think about this topic. I googled the question, “ What would life be like without computers?” This is the number of hits Google got in 0.69 seconds: About 124,000,000 results. Try it yourself.
And what if computers had never been invented, where would we be all today? Your guess is as good as mine.
