So that adds up to how many days?
Apple has made a lot of mistakes in the past with it’s OS updates, but the biggest one by far is the addition of the Screen Time feature. I have never felt more judged and scrutinized in my entire life than when I decide to open that page in Settings (and I regularly attend Indian family functions). It’s almost as though I touch the screen with genuinely no clue of what I am going to see on the other side. It’s like a bad game of poker. There will always be some ridiculous number next to Instagram and I’ll have the same reaction that I do when my parents embarrass me in public, ‘there is no way that this is mine’. This reaction is followed by a dark realization that this is all my doing and an entire day attributed to making the situation worse because it is in my genes to be competitive with math and hence, numbers.
Growing up, I remember my dad saying to me “everyone gets 24 hours in a day, how you decide to spend them is what sets you apart”. If only he knew what I was up to. I wish I could say that I was doing something useful like looking at educational video lectures on Udemy or surfing through news apps. Unfortunately, even Tasty videos featuring pull-apart pizza knots don’t quite count and that seems to be the only thing I’m learning these days – and I’m still struggling with that (the yeast in my bread seems to be about as active as I am.). Imagine the things I could be doing with that saved time – quantum mechanics could be right up my alley and I’d be writing a blog about my new findings in the realm of particle theory.
I tried sitting down to figure out what exactly I would do sitting at home if I wasn’t looking at a screen and all I could come up with was lying down in the garden outside staring at the sky. So, essentially, sleeping. Seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? We as humans have such a constant need to keep ourselves stimulated. If I’m not staring at my phone, I’m looking at my work laptop screen and if I’m not doing that, then I’m staring at the TV. I paid an extra 100 bucks to get a blue light filter on my glasses because it’s that real of a problem and something that seems completely unavoidable.
I keep remembering that visual that we were all shown as kids of a person looking at their phone. It demonstrated the impact on your neck of staring down at your phone – apparently its equivalent to a 50 pound weight. This sounds incredibly scary. I can’t even lift a 10 pound weight to save my life. At times I do wish that I was born in simpler times. It would be nice to have an instinct to finally learn how to complete the monkey bars rather than taking a speed typing test for fun.
