Technology - a Boon or a Curse.

C an you guys tell me how your day starts? Let me tell you, more than half of the population reading this article has checked their phone within one hour of waking up. Do we really need to? I mean, not always, right? Some may have important emails, some may have spam emails as well, some have weather alerts, some have news notifications, some have last night's goodnight text, and what not.

And you know the funny part is that half of them are useless, but we still check them every single morning. Like it's some kind of ritual now. Wake up, check phone, then maybe brush teeth. In that order. Tell me if I am wrong.

Now I am not here to say technology is bad or technology is good. That's too simple and honestly a little boring. What I want to talk about is how deeply it has gotten into our lives without us even noticing.

Let's take an example. Many years ago, when our parents were kids, what do you think they did when they got lost? Did they open their phones and use GPS? No, right? They asked someone on the street or went to a shop for help.

But now we just open maps and follow the line. Well, life has been made easier by GPS. I don't know about you, but for me it has saved me many times from getting lost. But in between that, we have lost the experience of figuring things out, meeting new strangers, having a five-minute conversation with a random kid who also doesn't know the direction but will still help you using all his ways. Things like these don't happen anymore.

And that is what technology does. It solves one problem and quietly creates another one that takes us years to even notice.

Social media is the biggest example of this, honestly. When social media platforms like Facebook first came, people were genuinely excited. You could find your old school friends, share photos, keep in touch with relatives who live far away. That was the idea. That was the promise. And for a while, it actually worked like that.

But somewhere down the line, it became something else entirely. Now you open social media and in thirty seconds you have seen someone getting a job offer, someone's high CGPA, someone buying a new car, someone going on a trip, and somehow you feel worse about your own life than you did thirty seconds ago. Nobody talked about that part in the brochure.

But here is the thing I also cannot ignore. Technology has done some genuinely unbelievable things. Doctors are doing surgeries with robotic tools with so much precision. Students in small towns are studying from the same YouTube videos as kids in big expensive schools. A farmer in a village checks the weather forecast on his phone before deciding what to plant. These are not small things. These are actually life-changing in the most real sense of the word.

So what is the answer then? Boon or curse?

Both. At the same time. Depending on the day and how much battery your phone has.

I think the real question is not whether technology is good or bad. The real question is whether we are using it or it is using us. Because there is a difference. A big one.

When you pick up your phone because you want to do something specific, that is you using it. When you pick it up because you are bored or anxious and you don't even know why you opened it, that is it using you.

Most of us are somewhere in between. And that is fine. We are all figuring this out as we go because honestly nobody has done this before. No generation before us had to deal with this exact version of the world.

So we are all just experimenting and making mistakes and scrolling a little too much at night and waking up the next morning and doing it again.

The discussion will keep going. It has been going for years and it will keep going. Maybe that is the point. Maybe some questions are not meant to be answered. They are just meant to keep us thinking.

And on that note, I am going to close my laptop. After sending this, obviously. And you should also, after reading this, obviously.