Blue Screen Pandemic

“The human world without real social interactions can be like a true jungle”
Rewinding to year 2009 or so, I used to come across one in a thousand senior executives switching attention to their Blackberry, in the middle of a conversation. This was an annoying phenomenon to me back then. Fast forward to 2017 and every week my son catches me not paying attention to his words, where he finds me glancing at the blue screen with that addicted stare for “nothing specific”
The scale and widespread nature of blue screen addition is just scary. Once in a while, I stare around my fellow passengers in a public bus or train and I feel very alone in the crowd. The quest for consuming more content, videos and games is unending. It feels like people are unconsciously damaging their physical and mental wellbeing by just staring at the screen doing the “unending” thing (unlike when you get addicted to reading a book, the pages are limited in there). This is an ADDICTION and of serious consequence, IMO.
Why is this a serious problem ? This is a serious problem because, most of us don’t yet seem to realize the lost time and energy, anxiety that this addiction brings in. Experian marketing research in UK found that an average employee checks their mail almost 20 to 40 times an hour. A child phycology research done in the US found average time spent on bluescreen by teens is between 4 to 7.5 hours a day. This is at the “expense” of their playtime, family time, exercise time and other tangible goodness. The above two simple data points can clearly show the amount of unaccounted time going into immersing in the meaningless “cyber interactions”. Cyanide on this cake is the “physical and posture” related regression. We stay in bad postures for long periods of time to look into these Dumb-phones/tabs(I now have frequent neck and radiating shoulder pain, thanks to my hours on smartphones).
To conclude, we have to recognize the seriousness of the problem before it is too late. Blue-screen addiction is no different from Tobacco or Alcohol. Yes, seriously !! It is bad for physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, social relationships and draws you to that vice more and more. Why is this any different ?
Develop simple discipline to measure the time going into these devices and have easy-to-try tactics to reduce the temptation. I undertook the oath to not use the smartphone on train, before 8 am, after 8pm etc., Some simple self-guiding rules can go a long way.
Smiling into a phone and ignoring the person sitting next to you, is a problem. Let us realize this ..