My 29 years of interacting with technology have taught me several lessons. 1) If it seems sketchy, it probably is, so trust your gut and don’t click on it. 2) If a site tells you to turn off your Ad-Blocker, do not turn off your Ad-Blocker. 3) Incognito pages does not protect your IP address from being seen, that’s what VPNs are for.

Are you ever busy with something or playing a game on your computer and you’re suddenly inundated with pop-ups from your anti-virus software? Yeah, it’s annoying, but the nuisance is worth it if they’re keeping malware out of your computer. Sometimes your anti-virus will flag a file as infected when you know it’s not, though you never know. How would you know if Bill from accounting sent you the Excel sheets for last week and somehow laced it with a Trojan horse? And are you sure that’s going to install the program you wanted or some infected adware?

What is one thing that has made the world safer? Technology. What is one thing that has made the world scarier? Technology. What is most likely going to end human-kind? Sentient AI, probably, as Hawking predicted. But I think we can agree that technology has been both a huge boost in human development at the cost of also being a detriment to the human psyche. Think of those idealized shows from the 1950s where happy nuclear families went about their lives as though there wasn’t rampant racial inequality, conflicts happening overseas, and a polio epidemic. The thing is, they didn’t have Internet back then. They couldn’t check little devices in their pocket that gave them all the global news on a screen in seconds. They had television news, radios, and newspapers. Perhaps they were happier because they didn’t know how much was wrong in the world.

Or maybe I’m sensationalizing things. It is certainly daunting to wake up everyday to breaking news of how nonsensical wars are going or what law has taken your rights away that week. But the fact that we know what’s going on in real-time allows us to prepare for the worst. Weather reports tell us to go to the basement when a tornado touches down, you’re told what’s happening with local protests and riots. However doom and gloom the news might be, we are nonetheless informed.