Today most of us use devices for work. We are constantly bombarded each day with the ping from the inbox, the social media notification, the meeting reminder, the text alert or the phone call…
Now with the ubiquity of smartphones, we are more distracted than ever.
But we aren’t just using devices for work. The real issue is how much they are creeping into our free time. We finish the digital work day and then pick up our digital personal lives. We are spending more time with our two-dimensional friends than our real ones.
In the film Wall-E, the future of humankind has everyone in a hoverchair with a screen attached to the arm, drinking liquified food and completely oblivious to their surroundings. They have never turned their heads to look away from the screen in front of them. They have video chats with the person in the chair next to them. The film was made in 2008, a year after the first iPhone was released. The future presented doesn’t seem too hard to imagine.
In the UK, people spend an average of 8 hours and 41 minutes a day on devices. This is more than the average person sleeps a night. In 1984, due to the increase in people showing an unhealthy behaviour around new technology, the term “techno stress” was coined. 1984!
All this time being digitally distracted has started to affect our attention spans. “Attention is the greatest commodity of the digital age,” says Julia Baird. We have devices to free up our time, yet we lose so much of it by being glued to a screen. We have become like toddlers, flitting from one activity to the next, never allowing ourselves to get bored, constantly seeking distraction and looking for inspiration. So many of us suffer from phantom pocket vibration syndrome, where we are desperate for our next dopamine instalment from a like, comment or share, so that we think our phones are ringing when they are not.
If we are spending all this time on devices, how much time are we missing? How many moments are we not there for because we are sucked into the digital world?
Julia Baird recalls a time when she was trying to throw out her 10 year old son’s old underpants. His response was, “But Mum! Think of all the memories in these underpants!” He was able to regale all the adventures he had whilst in this particular pair. These underpants held so many memories, they helped him document years of his life.
If he had stayed at home on his device, he would never have these underpant memories. By being so absorbed in the digital world, we are missing all the underpant memories we could create in the real world.
The trouble we have now is that whilst we are having these experiences – potential underpant memories – we are watching them through a screen. We aren’t truly present as we are filming them thinking of our future selves. But when was the last time you looked back at all your photos and videos from these experiences?
It is about experiencing the moment, in the moment. Oliver Burkeman asks, “Can you have an experience you don’t experience?” There is that famous clip of a fan at a Beyonce concert and she tells him to put the camera away, saying she is standing right in front of him. He is missing her. We all see it: football finals, museums, birthday parties, and precious family dinners.
It is like we are saying we are too busy to experience this now, so we are storing it up for the future. The trouble is we never get round to it. If our mind is elsewhere we might as well not be there. We are emotionally and mentally absent from the present moment.
As Simone Weil said, “Paying attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Do yourself a favour, spend less time on devices. Get out into nature. Unplug. De stress. Don’t let magical moments pass you by.
Go make some underpant memories.