The price of progress

Innovation can be awfully expensive.

Now, I realize there are a few good things about progress, but do you ever stop and think about how much we pay for items that used to be much less expensive or didn’t even exist at all?

I was pondering progress while studying the regress in my checking account today and came up with a few items to complain about, I mean to discuss with you:

Phones – I love my cell phone and am on it constantly, but I often think about how much less we paid when we only had phones on the wall. It was more expensive if we called long distance, but we didn’t pay extra for data and it was the same price no matter how many phones you had in the house.  It was actually somewhat of an event when the phone rang.  Today, we rarely use our phones for actual phone calls, and we don’t even answer the calls half of the time.

Television – I think about this one way too much. Growing up in flat northwest Ohio, we could get a bunch of television stations over the air, and it didn’t cost a dime. All you had to pay for was a television and an antenna for your house, and you were good to go. Sometimes, the antenna on the television set would just do the trick. Today, I have to pay for cable or internet, and then I pay for streaming services, too. It is great to have more channels and much nicer televisions, but it was also great to have it be free (or at least much less expensive) and it was much simpler to change the channels.

Computers – I love my computer and use it for work and for relaxing, but it is much more expensive than computers simply not existing. 

Cars – Cars have always been expensive, but with all of the new conveniences of cars, I hate how they can be so expensive to fix at times. Every time I have had an electric window break in a car I have owned, I wished I could just crank the windows up ad down with my hands like I did when I was younger.

Thinking about the price of progress also get me wondering about what items that we take for granted today will be very different and more expensive in the future, or what new items we might pay monthly bills for.

New items added to our electricity or gas bills– I don’t know what they could change with this, but I never would have expected everything that they changed with the phone and cable bills. Will electricity just be sent through the air? Could it include hologram data? (That sounds weird, but think how weird it would have sounded 40 years ago to say the internet would come through phone lines or television cables).

3-D printers – They can build anything! Surely we will all have 3-D printers in the future. You can also be confident that they will be expensive and we won’t know how we lived without them.

Trash – I don’t now how trash pickup could be more expensive, but surely something will be added to it to make it cost more.  Could they also deliver packages? (It’s not a bad idea you know). Will they remove our costly 3-D printer waste?

Robot chefs – It’s cheaper to cook our own food now, but think how much we will love our robot chefs!

Holograms – Will we pay a hologram bill each month or will our employers pay for that?

Jet pack insurance – You can’t fly a jet pack without jet pack insurance.  It’s worth it, though. It’s quicker than walking and the traffic is much easier to navigate.

Musical clothes – I am not sure how this would work, but I currently have music that plays through the light/fan in my bathroom. If that is possible, surely I can have music in my shirts, or possibly movies that play in my shoes in the future. I will happily pay the monthly charge.

Face mask phones – I think they could sell these right now. Everyone buys masks now and everyone has phones. Why not combine them?

Virtual reality cleaning services – Stick with me on this one for a moment. If we all have virtual reality devices in the future and can have virtual reality vacations or adventures, maybe someone will need to clean up the virtual reality vacation homes or other places.

Phones – I don’t know what they will add in the next 5-10 years, but you can be sure that phones will be more advanced, more amazing and more expensive as we move forward. I just hope I get good service for my phone on my jet pack.