How You Know When Gadgets Are Taking Over Your Life

Gadgets. Where would we be without them?

In our complex twenty-first century world it seems as though weâ??ve developed a gadget that can help with virtually every aspect of our lives: we have cooking and cleaning gadgets to help with the household chores, navigational gadgets to simplify driving, mobile phones that can do just about anything from remotely activating your central heating to creating a high-resolution video of your kidsâ?? birthday party and automatically uploading it to Facebook. And then there are the entertainment gadgets. Thousands of them. Computers and tablets, games consoles, music players, personal video recorders, 3D televisions, digital radiosâ?¦ the list is already unending and seems to grow by the day.

Why? Because we love gadgets. They make life easier and more fun for us. We like to own them and show them off to our friends. We like to give and receive them as gifts. The problem is that itâ??s getting easier and easier to become obsessive about gadgets, and more and more difficult to live without them. Gradually, stealthily like some kind of technological conspiracy the gadgets are gaining controlâ?¦

Donâ??t believe me? Hereâ??s how you know when gadgets are taking over your life.

1. You automatically reach for your smartphone when you hear a phone ring. Any phone: someone elseâ??s phone that doesnâ??t have a ringtone anything like yours, or even a phone on the telly.
2. You become immensely frustrated when youâ??re at the football match on a Saturday afternoon and you find that you canâ??t pause, rewind and replay that last goal in real life.
3. You refuse to acknowledge that the world could possibly have existed, let alone survived, before the invention of the internet.
4. After promising your spouse that youâ??re having â??one last gameâ?? on the games console at bedtime, you find youâ??re still playing at 3.20am in an increasingly desperate bid to beat your own best score.
5. Youâ??re compelled to sleep rough outside your local technology store for three nights in order to be the first to own an updated gadget that is only fractionally better than the one you slept rough to buy two months ago.
6. Your living room has more technological firepower than NASAâ??s Mission Control thanks to your impressive array of entertainment gadgets.
7. You hit the â??send/receiveâ?? or â??refresh inboxâ?? button on your email client every thirty seconds or so â??just in caseâ?.
8. You use YouView to record and replay every single transmission of Channel 5â??s â??The Gadget Showâ?? or any TV programme which features Stephen Fry banging on about his deep love of gadgets.
9. You regard the purpose of a holiday as an annual reminder of what â??outsideâ?? and â??fresh airâ?? feel like, and even then youâ??ll only stay in hotels that provide decent wireless internet connectivity.
10. You canâ??t believe that your grandparents donâ??t understand even the simplest of â??gadgetyâ?? concepts such as using a mobile deviceâ??s 3G connectivity to tether it to a personal computer thus creating a wireless internet hotspot or Personal Area Network (PAN).
11. More than half of your monthly electricity bill is attributable to recharging mobile gadgets or leaving home gadgets in â??standbyâ?? mode.
12. You require an â??appâ?? to help you make the simplest of decisions, such as whether to have a fried chicken takeaway or a pizza takeaway for dinner.
13. Youâ??ll happily drive into a river because the Satnav told you to, and since the Satnav is based upon sound and proven technological principles it must be right.
14. Youâ??ve read points 1 to 13 and have failed to realise that they may be just a little tongue-in-cheek.

Attached Images:

•  License: Royalty Free or iStock source: http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-8727682-digital-times.php?st=1636673

John is a freelance journalist and recovering gadget addict from the UK.