Have we arrived yet? Has everything in the 21st century been worth it? We’re living in a society where anything one wants and desires is available in a matter of seconds through an app. While so much of it is valuable and is a natural progression of our technological progress, much of what we’ve accomplished and built feels like it’s disconnecting us with what it means to be human. This isn’t meant to be an exploration into what makes humans most human but rather wondering if we’ve lost contact with one of the things that makes us human.

For the sake of this discussion let’s say that what makes us the most human is our connectedness with other humans. It’s our ability to gain share and gain new experiences through others. Traditionally, this has happened through spoken and printed word. So many technologies today allow us to sidestep the need for physical communication and replace it with communication in the form of sculpted pixels.

While this certainly may seem a bit like a case of “biting the hand that feeds you” given my technology background, at some point I feel we all must wonder: are what we’re building and spending our time with every day only separating us further from ourselves? I don’t mean to say that technology can’t aid this task, rather that sometimes it creates barriers to us further realizing our true selves.