Is "New" Better?

[Bob Ballard]

We live in a world where "new" is a good thing. If something is new it is automatically better, an improvement of some type. In our consumer culture, new things are needed to encourage consumption. The tag line "new and improved" has been used in thousands of ad campaigns for almost every service and product that exists.

Why do we think that "new" is better? I guess we believe that something new must be an improvement over the old and that people wouldn't work to improve something unless it really made a difference. There are probably lots of other reasons why we believe new is better as well.

Technology seems to be the area where we most hear about new things. New cell phones, computers, software and a host of other gadgets all promise to improve our lives somehow. Most of the improvements are about making things easier, faster or more efficient. Ease, speed and efficiency are attributes that we believe are good things. But what makes them good?

In the consumer culture and the economic engine that drives it, ease, speed and efficiency are valued because these things allow the machine (of which we are part) to produce more stuff, faster and easier. On a personal level, having one device that can send email, search the net, call people and hold your entire contact database seems like a really good thing. We use it to accomplish things faster and easier, but there is a hidden price, a latent cost to this.

Why would human beings want to do things faster and more efficiently? Because of some perceived benefit for doing so. The implied benefits could be less frustration and stress in completing our tasks. We also believe that time saved through efficiency could be used for other activities we enjoy like exercising, reading or just be with family and friends.

However, in order to use the "new" devices such that they actually work, two things must happen. One, we must be willing to devote time to learn how to use the device. Of course, this makes us less efficient, at least temporarily, but we believe we will recover that time from future efficiency. The other thing that happens is we begin to shift from a human consciousness to a machine's concept of being human - a human machine. Machines, like those that make up our economic engine, value efficiency and speed. Human beings value things that machines can not appreciate, like love, connection, beauty, etc. and to experience these we need time.

As we accept and incorporate new technology in our lives, we become more like machines and less like human beings. We adopt the values of machines and actually train ourselves to be more like machines by using the new technology in our lives. As we loose connection with source, with human consciousness, the time that we thought we would save is experienced by the human machine we have become rather than the human being we truly are. We want time to experience things that we love, but the machine we have become believes speed and efficiency is our purpose in life. Thus, we are frustrated because we become machines disconnected from the essence of human experience. We are endlessly fascinated with "new."

Once we adopt the values of machines, the importance being human diminishes. The time we "save" is a useless illusion. We use the time to learn more new technology and then struggle to turn off our machine mentality, connect with our humanity and be present to life.