3. Live way out in the country (no cell phone service) and do whatever you want.
I have been a technology advocate for most of my adult life, specifically with respect to computers and information technology. I have always known that nearly everything in this life has a duality to it.
The same technology that allows to to use a GPS in your car or find the definition to a word on a smart phone in the palm or your hand, can, and has been turned to evil use.
There are a few things in my life that I view with regret, and my advocacy of these technologies is something I have come to view with greater regret as the dark shadow they cast across humanity becomes ever darker with each relentless surge of tyrants and statists who have reached the point where our every move can be tracked, every monetary transaction surveilled, and every bit of information we get access to is shaped and fed to 4 billion unsuspecting people every single day.
It really hit home with me some years back when my wife and I were staying at a hotel, and when we came down to the lobby to have the breakfast that was included in the cost of the room, we passed a family of four having breakfast.
None of them were talking or interacting with each other. They were all on their smart phones, gazing intently at them, silently prodding with their fingers, their expressionless faces completely unaware of any other person sitting at that table with them.
There was something about that vignette I found deeply disturbing and shocking. But I suspect, of every other of the dozens of persons in that hotel lobby that morning, my wife and I may have been the only ones who noted this.
I remember thinking: "Is this what I was a cheerleader for? People becoming nearly incapable of interacting with each other face to face?" and feeling deeply ashamed of it.
In the intervening years since then, I have thought of Winston Churchill's famous passage in his "Finest Hour" speech:
"...But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science..."
It is that "lights of perverted science" that has really been eating at me. When you have a country like China who, by 2022-2023 is expected to have one state operated video surveillance camera for every two citizens, partnering with Google, which shapes and forms the "facts" meted out to billions of people every single day as "facts" where the whole shaping of the data is completely opaque to those unknowing people...I wonder with some sense of fear if that is where we have led ourselves, and people like me, enthusiastically doing so.
Like Capitalists who provide the rope to their tyrannical enemies to hang them with.
And what concerns me is, I never thought I would hear people in the schools and media (never mind the government itself!) embracing the model being set forth by the Communists. Never. Ever. I never thought in my life I would see and hear that. But here we are.
Some people may read something like this and think it is overwrought and melodramatic. I don't think it is. I think it is even worse than I have stated here. So yes. I have definitely given thought to that. But my wife has not, and she isn't likely to. So, for the rest of my life, however long that may be, I am bound to where she is. Such is my willing choice.