Yale Law l: The Irony of Abundance

In applying to Yale law school I was required to submit a 250 word essay on any give topic. Below is the first essay amongst my the three finalists:

The New York Times recently published an article exploring the problematic implications of rampant technological use on the brains of high school students. Yet, the source of the problem is not the abundance and pervasiveness of technology, such as Facebook, smart-phones, and I-pads, but rather its misuse.While our technological age has opened the floodgates of information that was once the privilege of the elite, it has also, ironiclly, created a problem of too much information. But the irony of abundance is not limited to technology. The abundance of food -itself a result of technological knowhow- has created a plethora of unimaginable dilemmas for Americans. Whereas as once our society was afflicted with starvation now we are burdened by over-sized guts and an epidemic of obesity related health problems that kill more Americans each year than malnutrition ever did.

How is it that our society has so abused the abundance we have achieved? Instead of leveraging the, relatively cheap, abundance of healthy produce to engender a well nourished and healthy society we have used an economy of scale to create fast food that unhealthier than it is cheap.. Instead of gorging ourselves on the intellectual bounty of C-span and PBS, we have squandered our access to knowledge on YouTube, online porn, and yellow journalism.

But, like nuclear energy, we must embrace abundance however terrible our failure to choose correctly is. True the higher we climb the greater the fall, but technology is value neutral. It offers us the choice to choose greatness, to actualize the positive inherent in the irony of abundance.