During my senior year of engineering I had to fulfill a 3 credit humanties elective, so I took a course called "Technology and Man". Keep in mind this was back in the mid '80's, so the internet, cd's, dvd's, and a whole bunch of other conveniences had not yet been developed.

The entire course centered around how products designed to make life easier for people would actually make things tougher in the long run. I pretty much dismissed the prof as a Kashi-eating liberal, but did all the homework assignments, aced all the tests, and graduated. I had not thought very much about anything the prof had lectured on for many years, but it finally dawned on me a few years ago -- he was not that far off.

Granted, mobile phones, voice mail, email, tele-conferencing, etc. were all heralded as items to allow increased productivity with less work. Initially that seemed to be the case -- instead of driving to the library and spending hours researching a subject, we could now type a few search words into Google and have the data virtually instantly.

That said, it is rare that I'm not in the office by 7:30am, and I usually don't eat dinner until 7:30pm, or later if my wife is running errands. More often than not, I'm answering emails or paying bills electronically in the evening, and am lucky to get six hours of sleep.

Thinking back to the late 60's and early 70's as I was growing up, my Father left for the office at 8:45am, and was always (always!) home by 5:10pm, with dinner promptly at 6:00pm. Everyone was generally in bed by 10:00pm (maybe 11:00pm on a weekend) and New Years Eve was the one night a year that any of us actually stayed up until midnight.

It now appears to me that my humanities prof actually knew what he was talking about. Despite all the modern conveniences (or pehaps because of them) it seems that we all work twice as hard as our parents ever did, and yet there just isn't enough time left over to do the "extra" things, that in fact are probably the things that really matter.

Jim