Gadgets: An Obsession more than A Necessity
You definitely own a smartphone or a Laptop or a Tablet, maybe all three of them. And chances are, you spend more time on these techies than elsewhere.
A survey on the Internet shows that the average adult spends more than half of his waking hours staring at a device of some kind, engaged in some form of media or digital communication, considering an average of 8 hours 21 minutes of sleep in a 24 hour period. (To be specific regarding the calculations, we have 24hrs — 8hrs 21mins = 15hrs 39mins waking hours out of which more than half, one spends in these).
An interesting and informative world, staying connected to the internet is addictive and engaging. With the development of infinite scrolling, the site page grows and grows with additional and relevant content. Facebook, and so many other pages, never runs out of posts! It creates a virtual reality for the user, who spends so much time with new and interesting stuff popping on the internet, hence leading to more chat box conversations than in real life.
The discrepancy between an individual’s loneliness and the number of connections in his social network is horrific yet engages him into this, making him isolated in turn. One confuses this loneliness with solitude(pleasant alone time), and enjoys the short term benefits, ignoring the high price he pays in terms of deteriorating health and happiness.
The late night regular use and staying up all night is not only detrimental to our lifestyle, but is changing our brains and as humans we are facing a definite crisis concerning our individual identity. We tend to fake ourselves on social media, displacing the ‘true self’ with an exaggerated, ideal self.
Anxiety and depressive symptoms are common, since pretending and trying to be like others certainly creates a bad effect. In addition, the missing real time interaction with friends and family makes way for unwantedness and loneliness.
Not only when bored, subconsciously, one is always expecting a call or a text and this means that the sleep is also lighter and disturbed. The artificial light from TV and computer screens also affects melatonin production and throws off circadian rhythms, thus preventing deep, restorative sleep.
The Obsession probably drives us to the clinic as the ill-effects are never ending. From neck and back problems to hearing loss and vision problems, technology also affects the memory, attention, focus and our sleep cycles. Apart from losing control over our lives, we undoubtedly, have outsourced our memory to Google, contacts, GPS, Calendar alerts and Calculators.
Staying connected online has become such an integral part of our lives that we continue with this lifestyle inspite of knowing about all of this. Let us instead choose to strip away the parts of our life that bring us down and instead refocus that energy towards being the best versions of ourselves. Talking to a real life human about an incident feels a lot more meaningful than reading facebook memes and insta updates, trust me. Quite simply, turn the devices off, and just be, maybe more productive and peaceful.
