Trade-offs

This week a colleague and I were talking about the brave souls who came west in the mid-1800s and maybe just the past in general. Or maybe we were talking about the present and all the madness that's going on (seriously, peeps, the world has lost its mind!). I don't even remember, which shows something, I'm sure, but the important thing is that during this conversation, I mentioned that if it is a trade-off between crazy today and going back 175 years to no indoor plumbing, I'll take today.

Does the "Internet"* drive me nuts at least fifty percent of the time? Yes. Do I want to blush and put on those fake glasses with the nose and mustache attached almost every time anything comes out of the DC government? Pretty much. Do I want to pull my hair out every time we hook up another appliance (say, a vacuum cleaner) to the internet and give it artificial intelligence? ABSOLUTELY (why? Why does my vacuum need the internet? Or a pseudo brain? Why?!?!?!)

But, I do like the internet**, mostly. And I LOVE indoor plumbing. And planes. And grocery stores, where I can buy cheese, rather than having to work on a farm and make it myself (although I can see some attraction to that. Not enough to wish I lived in the 1850s, though). So, if the trade-off to having all of these things is the 24 hour news stations and selfies and WAY too many memes, I guess that's okay.*** I know how to avoid that and just get the good stuff I want.

And it definitely beats outhouses.


*"Internet" being the version of the internet that has been anthropomorphized into some sort of actual person/entity. As in, "The Queen did such and such and the Internet lost its mind." Or, "Suzy Q wore such and such on the red carpet and the Internet can't get enough of it." Can we make the "Internet" not a thing?
**the internet: "the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide". Thank you, Wikipedia. The internet is pretty great. 
***As long as they don't force me to view all this stuff.