What Could You Do With Your Screen Time?
I know, I know, I've spoken about this before very recently. Bare with me, I have more to say about this.
So my iPhone is giving me reports on how much time I spend using it. Right now, I regretfully must report that I use my phone for three hours and thirty-nine minutes a day. A day.
Do you know what I could do with three hours and thirty-nine minutes a day? I could learn a new language, hell I could invent a new language. I could train for an actual marathon if I used those three hours.
I could have a kid. I mean who spends more than three hours of quality time with their kid in a day? I could read everything. I mean everything. It's possible I could know everything if I used
What am I doing with my life? Why is it being pedaled away on this stupid device? It's just a gadget. I was reading this article, on my phone, in The New York Times about how they haven't invented anything new really since the invention of the smartphone.
It should be called the dumbphone, it's clearly making me dumb. I don't have time to clean up my room but I have time to google Priyanka Chopra's wedding photos? She does look good, I'll admit. She probably spends three hours a day putting in the effort to look that good. Maybe I could look that good if I had my priorities straight.
Anyways I think the author of that article has a point. Weren't we supposed to have flying cars by now? Shouldn't they have invented a device that can read people's minds by now? Why does this look nothing like the future we imagined in the eighties?
I should be able to go back to the eighties in my time machine and meet the cast of Star Trek and beam myself back to the present. Nothing looks futuristic about our lives. Sure we can have a conversation with Alexa or Siri but we should also realize that we are being recorded the entire time we are in the presence of those kinds of devices.
Yes, we have given up our privacy for technology. We are giving up learning new languages for technology. What's next? We don't have enough new technology but we have too much technology. We don't know what to do with all this.
Let's face it, we are not going to shut it down. It's only going to get worse with robots and robotic sex dolls etc. Our friends and therapists will soon be machines. They have invented too much but they haven't invented enough.
What to do? I could solve all the world's problems in the amount of time I spend staring at my iPhone all day. What could you do with the time you spend on your phone? Do you think you could better yourself? The world?
What were we doing with our time before smartphones? It's not like I had three hours a day to spare when I didn't have an iPhone. I found a way to waste my time then too.
This gives me the overall feeling that I'm not using my time wisely. Like there is the idea that if you didn't spend four dollars a day on coffee you could buy a private jet. But all those people who don't buy coffee at Starbucks, where is their private jet?
We know how to waste time and money regardless of what we do. I just don't remember exactly how I wasted my time before technology. I have a feeling I read more books and had more conversations. I listened to music more carefully, it wasn't just on in the background when I while I was surfing the net. Everything is in the background now as I surf the Internet.
Believe it or not, before the Internet people still managed to waste much of their day at work. Humans by nature, have too much time on their hands and their most common complaint is that there are not enough hours in the day.
This report from my iPhone has made me reprioritize what I'm doing with my time. I am busy, just like everyone else. But I guess I'm really busy checking my phone a lot. I'm going to try to be less addicted to this crap and find a better addiction.
I hear opioids are all the rage.
nina