There is something slightly ironic about sitting here in front of the screen, writing about the value of taking time away from the screen, as a sort of mental health exercise.
Truth is, I have always felt better when I am mostly not near the computer... but it seems we have become very attached to this whole thing and are tethered to it by some sort of invisible umbilical cord, whether we like it, or not.
That's especially true for those of us who are actually trying to make a living from our online activities.
Many years ago, I had a friend who refused to have a television in his house, sticking with the statement that "TV eats your brain."
Fast forward all these years, and I am slowly starting to believe in the notion that our personal screens — phones, tablets, computers, whatever — are "eating our brains."
Aside from the fact that we end up just sitting for so many hours a day, we so easily get sidetracked into clicking around in a meaningless circle, watching TikTok clips, following twitter/X feeds and more... in pursuit of any kind of content that will help feed our growing dopamine addictions.
Today — being Independence Day, and all — we spent much of the day with friends, just sitting around talking, eating hot dogs with all the trimmings, and later on playing cards at the dining table when it got a tad bit too windy outside.
I actually left my phone in the car, and didn't really miss it, at all.
Perhaps that's easier for me to do, having actually grown up in a world before there was an Internet. I noticed that the under-30s spent a lot more time looking at their phones, even though there were flesh-and-blood people interacting with them.
It all made me think back to a time in the earliest days of the Internet, when I was part of a group that was studying what was — at the time — a whole new frontier, and we were contemplating how Life Behind the Screen was going to alter humanity's entire perception of interaction and engagement with each other.
Interestingly enough, we concluded that the whole idea of "virtual life" wasn't actually as new as everyone would like to think... because people would develop entire friendships and relationships via handwritten correspondence back in Victorian times, in the second half of the 1800s.
What was "new" wasn't the connecting remotely; what was new was to get an instantanous reply, as opposed to having to way for days or even weeks by the mailbox to hear back from the other person.
As such, the web has simply become one more "link" in our seemingly pervasive need to get everything to happen faster and faster.
A large part of what I really enjoyed about today was the fact that things were a lot slower, when it was just people share space in a room, in ordinary conversation.
I sort of miss that...
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your weekend!
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Created at 2025.07.05 00:14 PDT
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