Everywhere I look outside my home I see people busy on their high-tech devices, while driving, walking, shopping, even sitting in toilets. When connected electronically, they are away from physical reality.

People have been influenced to become technology addicted. One survey reported that “addicted” was the word most commonly used by people to describe their relationship to iPad and similar devices. One study found that people had a harder time fighting against the allure of social media than they did for sleep, cigarettes and alcohol.

The main goal of technology companies is to get people to spend more money and time on their products, not to actually improve our quality of life. They have successfully created a cultural disease. Consumers willingly give up their freedom, money and time to catch up on the latest information, to keep pace with their peers or to appear modern.

I see people trapped in a pathological (病态的) relationship with time-sucking technology, where they serve technology more than technology serves them. I call this technology servitude. I am referring to a loss of personal freedom and independence because of uncontrolled consumption of many kinds of devices that eat up time and money.

What is a healthy use of technology devices? That is the vital question. Who is really in charge of my life? That is what people need to ask themselves if we are to have any chance of breaking up false beliefs about their use of technology. When we can live happily without using so much technology for a day or a week, then we can regain control and personal freedom, become the master of technology and discover what there is to enjoy in life free of technology. Mae West is famous for the wisdom that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” But it’s time to discover that it does not work for technology.

Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google acknowledged that “we can be swept away by our technologies.” To break the grand digital connection people must consider how life long ago could be fantastic without today’s overused technology.

The Good Gym was created by Ivo Gormley, 29, who discovered that combining a weekly run with a visit to a housebound（足不出户的）friend of the family was just the inspiration he needed to keep him exercising. It helped that his elderly friend was a former boxer who could offer training tips. As Gormley did his suggested sit-ups, he thought about this: how few people have the time or energy to volunteer and yet use gyms to burn off energy, and how little dialogue there is between working people and the elderly.

Through working with charities and local community centers, the Good Gym matches runners with an individual（个人的）coach 一 a housebound elderly person who would like a regular visitor. They are encouraged to take a newspaper or a modest gift to the value of £1.

Cawley, 38, a hairdresser, heard about the Good Gym through Twitter. "It seemed such a great idea," she said. It took four months for her to be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau・ Then she got Mulcahy to run to, based on the distance she requested.

Having a break in her running works well from a training point of view: she does a speed run to Mulcahy's house, rests there, then does a more gentle, warm-down jog on the way home. Cawley is from Stockport and has no grandparents in London, so she enjoys chatting to her elderly coach. While the Good Gym advises runners to stay for about 10 minutes, Cawley sometimes chats to Mulcahy for an hour. Although he has family, and regular visits from professional carers, Cawley thinks he enjoys a visit from someone who does not worry like relatives and is not there out of professional duty. She didn't really know what he thought of "this person turning up and chatting to him” until she told him she was going away on holiday. He said, "I'll really miss you."

Many of us seem to have lives that follow a certain way. From kindergarten all the way to when we get married, every stage of our lives seems to be preset. And although this works well for a lot of people, according to British scholar Jay Shetty, there is no “right” schedule to live our lives by.

A few months ago, a video of Shetty’s speech “Before You Feel Pressure” became popular on the Internet across the world. In the video, he sends an important message that we should think “outside of the way” and have the courage to follow our hearts. As Shetty says in the video, we don’t have to get stressed and put ourselves in a race with our peers or judge our lives based on others’. “Everything in life happens according to our time, our clocks,” he says.

In his inspiring speech, Shetty points out that UK author J. K. Rowling got her famous “Harry Potter” series published at age 32, after being turned down by 12 publishers. Shetty also mentions that US actor Morgan Freeman didn’t get his big break until he was 52 years old. So we shouldn’t let anyone rush us.

As physicist Albert Einstein once said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that’s counted truly counts. The key to staying on our own tracks is to be patient and keep our own interest. ” In Australian nurse Bronnie Ware’s best-selling book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”, she recorded the dying regrets of her patients, and the top one on the list was: “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the one others expected of me. ”

Indeed, we are all unique in our personalities and gifts, and there’s no perfect fit for all. We should listen to our inner voices and ignore what the world has taught us, and what we’ve picked up from people around us. “It is important to allow people to go back to being self-aware of their own interests, needs and concerns,” Shetty told the magazine. “It’s disconnecting from what ‘makes sense’ to what actually moves you and what makes sense internally (内在地). ”