Ease of access & broken laptops

I haven't been around as often as I used to. The reasons are not that simple.

^{Image taken from Pixabay}

I like ease of access (most of us do), and when my main laptop becomes so slow that it's barely usable, I don't feel motivated to keep trying to use it. Instead, I try to get a new one, and failing to do so (it's hard to find a good one for my tight budget), I just lie down on my bed and read novels all day every day.

This got me thinking about the idea that ease of access may lead to productivity in other fields. What if economic advancement leads to more technological inventions? I remember in history books that Greek philosophers were the people who had more leisure time to spend thinking about the meaning of things. Workers and slaves did not have that time. They worried about their day to day and the masters they served worried about the hierarchy of the layers of air that came out of their mouths when they breathed out... Ok, that's an exaggeration, but it was almost like that. Someone has probably thought of that.

And when all my laptops break and I'm left with one that takes 15 minutes to turn on and 30 seconds to switch between tabs, where I can't even open anything but Firefox and even in Firefox there are some websites that are too heavy to use, I'm left with the bitter flavour of defeat. I'm left without motivation to write my posts. If using my computer leads to annoyment, which is a form of suffering, then why would I want to keep doing it? (I'm not a masochist)

This, in turn, got me thinking of all the jobless people around me who would be able to eat if only they had a laptop to work on. My uncle, for example, told me that he studied accounting and that it is his favourite trade. He works as a security guard and hates it. I asked him why he doesn't do it and he said that it's because he doesn't have a laptop or internet. I was baffled and enlightened at the same time. How many talents are we wasting here in Venezuela because we're all just too poor to even have the means to work online?

You would say "well, you at least have a laptop". Yeah, but it's so slow that it's barely better than not having it. Right now, it's the first time I use it since 3 days ago. Every time I want to sit here and check Steemit, Reddit, Discord or whatever, I remember that it will take me around 20 minutes to turn on (it took me 1 hour today because there were Windows updates!) and then around 3 minutes to open whichever service I want to access.

"Is it worth it?", I ask myself, then I run to my bed and lie down again and grab a book and read it. They're way more entertaining than waiting for things to load. But hey, writing is also entertaining, and I need to write more often or all my effort on Steemit is going to have been wasted, so here I am, hello. o/ (Fourth wall broken)

What can we do to let people properly work? Even if the government wanted, it would be impossible to give a laptop as charity to every talented person who could work. Millions of people, 200 USD per laptop. Wait, they could, but it would be such a massive expense that it probably wouldn't work in such an impoverished land as Venezuela.

At least I'm personally close to having that amount. Maybe in a few months I'll be able to buy one for myself. But so many will have to spend their lives working dull jobs in dissatisfaction, working for one or two dollars a month. It's crazy how all hope is drowned little by little, squeezed for populism-juice.