I was walking around in LB the other day. I saw people with their humped backs and arched necks just staring mindlessly into their phones… I found it quite ironic that the smartphones that were meant to connect us have made us less social with nearly one in four adults reporting feeling lonely.
The average person spends five hours a day staring at their phone. That is more than two months a year. I think it is safe to say this is unhealthy; our brains were not designed to handle this much information.
Attention spans have fallen drastically by over 25% over the last decade. Services like Netflix, YouTube and Instagram even consider sleep as their biggest competitor when trying to take away your attention.
All this mindless consumption creates so much noise that we lose the ability to think clearly and independently which makes us more gullible to fake news and propaganda; advertisers even trick us into buying things we don’t need!
People are spending more time distracting themselves than trying to achieve their goals because big corporations are spending billions to design algorithms that never let you put your phone away. Here is an actionable step you can take to reduce screen time; all smartphones have an inbuilt feature to limit and show screen time and block distracting apps; we just need to use it.
As society moves to this digital age, we must foster a healthy relationship with our tools and not let them control us. People must realize that our time on this earth is limited; we cannot squander it. So, spend time with the ones that truly matter.
