Our society rotates in a ceaseless cycle of enhanced technology and upgrading the latest version of everything we consume. This is nothing new. The world around us is always building more outlets to connect people to other people through news, entertainment and knowledge.
Of course, technology makes things quicker and easier by maximizing productivity. Technology aims to limit communication barriers and reduce the time and effort it takes to carry out tasks, but this comes with a price.
As we consume more through our screens and do so at much faster rates, we begin to fall out of touch with our physical surroundings and lose our innate sense of time. Society has normalized this intimate bond we share with our phones, creating a more distracted population who leans on constant stimulation to feel connected.
We’ve all heard conversations about how today’s culture is saturated with excessive screen time, especially when it comes to things like social media use and streaming platforms on the internet. We are a people united by our shared access to a boundless online world.
Our rising screen time has slowly socialized us out of sitting still in the present. Spending alone time with our thoughts is a skill that has been stripped from us. Our capacity to feel, to think and to focus is tainted by the commanding desire to be anywhere other than where we are.
However, as our dependence on technology to occupy our minds grows stronger, we become less aware of how much of our time is wasted. When we are without our phones, we might feel like the world moves a bit slower, like life feels a bit more real. When we are without our phones, life is actually happening to us. We are in it — experiencing it — rather than observing and documenting it from a layered removed.
The “in-between” moments of our daily lives — when we wait for the train or ride an elevator — are easily ripped from us by simple decisions to disengage from our surroundings and tap into something less real.
We need to be cautious of constantly filling in the calm moments life grants us. Those are the ones that ultimately make up much of what our lives really are.
More than ever, we are prompted to continually distract ourselves through our devices. Technology offers so many built-in methods to stay stimulated while disassociating from the present. Consequently, our attention spans are withering away, and our cognitive capacity is in jeopardy.
As a society, we have normalized seeking out something external to alter our minds’ current emotional condition and temporarily change the way we feel. American culture leans more and more toward the glorification of immediate and short-term pleasure and accelerates a process of fleeting satisfaction, followed by disappointment and the need for more.
We fixate on these small adrenaline rushes and immediate rewards received through our phones, crowding our thoughts with outside input. Modern life plays out to the sound of technology, and this impacts our ability to exist in the absence of constant entertainment and preoccupation.
Simply sitting with ourselves and allowing our minds to be still is an overlooked skill that we’ve been socialized out of.
We should turn to our phones with intention, engaging with technology purposefully, rather than using it as a meaningless filler to pull us away from what’s around us.
