Smart Phones and Stupid People

Smart Phones and Stupid People by @movingman

I don't know about you , but for me I find laptops and smartphones very frustrating to use frequently and we don't have a loving relationship so much you could say. It's funny that I never see other's in public getting stressed at a non-responsive piece of technology like I do sometimes, but I realized lately that they all have contracts for their phones and so they get a better phone and a better internet also, which leaves the pay-as-u-go choice being slow or sometimes just a non-loading frozen smashed screen on a Smartphone. When I stop to ask people for directions, they look around and instantly take out the phone. People seem to not even remember or know the street names of the area they live in without using Google Maps, and then they say to me "haven't you got a smartphone?". When I tell them that its too crap to actually work , they say to me "Oh, you should just throw it away and go buy a new one"..

Before I had a smartphone, which was 2 years ago, I was amazed at how they took over peoples lives. I watched them holding it whilst walking almost anywhere just like a cup of coffee they would be ready to take a sip from when the thought came to mind. I only got one for Tinder (really). A complete ego thing and being in a country where it has the weirdest dating scene I have ever encountered, I soon realized that dating in Norway is all meeting online as nobody ever talks to strangers. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do!" It is true that when we have nothing to do and we have a smartphone in our hand's we seem to get streams of thoughts popping up like "I should message.." or "did anyone message me, or add a like?" and then we get it out if it's not already in our hand on standby. Never ending scrolling, down , down , down. It just never stops!

We used to read book-like material, nothing else. Things with pages, chapters and endings. The difference is that back then, we would have the thought arise that we wanted to stop reading and go do something else or take a nap, and so we would fold the corner of a page or use a Book Marker and put the book down and go back to it even sometimes days or weeks after.

The apps have no end, or any chapter to decide to stop to take a break, and so we never get to the end of what we were reading and the mind feels it didn't accomplish anything- because it never found the end, and so just like a monkey, it tells you to pick up the phone and start scrolling again to find something interesting to do with Your FREE Time (which everyone complains that they don't have enough of!)

"Ego" means "The image that you have of who you are" and the hardest thing to grasp without going through an amount of suffering, is that we are not that image that we have of ourselves. When I used to look at my Facebook more than once every 2 days as it is now, I was only reading and seeing the egos of people. One day they are posting "im so happy" and the next day "im so sad" or showing off the new car they just got expressing that they are rich, when its actually rented out monthly. I watch people when they take a photo of themselves, posing and adjusting hair even using the screen as a mirror. We transform ourselves into ego every time we post or take a selfie. "Look at me, This is me" the voice in the head says. And then we get a positive or negative reaction from someone " Ah Yeh! You look stunning! " and then that is giving more power to the ego, reinforcing this purely mental image. (It exists nowhere else does it?, did you realize that?) You could say "yes but look there's a picture of me that I just took now", but - in reality its just a picture of a human. Someone might then say "yes that's you!"... - but the question I ask you is - Where did the "me" go to?!

This is a problem that is causing firstly people to get more attached with their own ego, as in comparing yourself to others and then feeling inadequate and then believing that you yourself are inadequate (which is never true), and for teenagers it must be affecting them a lot. When I was school we didn't ever see peoples lives unless we went to have dinner at their house. Kids at school had less "competition" than there is today due to site's like Facebook because constantly at anytime you can go see what someones doing and how their house looks and you compare your story of the me, to the story of their egoistic "me".

Its an esteem destroyer to be growing up in a world where it's all about the image and the Kaa-ching, but ironic when you learn that really most of the "Rich" people you see around you in everyday life, are in so much debt that you would laugh if you knew, and none of what they use has been paid for fully. They wouldn't put that on Facebook to ruin the story and image they have of themselves, and this is where the circle goes on and on, building up firstly stress when the image of yourself is under threat, and then after some time depression occurs in both parties - the writer and the reader, both of whom are believing in just a story

Concentration, Levels of Attention and Creative Thinking.

Since the "Screen Revolution" has started, the average time that we can hold onto a thought (concentrate) is now only 8 seconds. Before we all had screens in our hands (before the year 2000 let's say), we had an attention time of 12 seconds - which leads us at this rate in a decade from now, to having less attention span than a goldfish.

I think they know what they are doing very well, don't you? image

We are using search engines when we have a question and this is making people lazy and stupid. People forget how we used to learn before search engines and internet. You had a subject that you wanted to find out about, for whatever reason, and you went to a Library. I'm only 34 and for me to write that feels like it was 70 years ago that this was happening, because who goes to a library anymore?! Even the people that do just go there to do office work with a laptop in quiet surroundings or research using a search engine and use copy and paste. We would use Thinking Power instead, plus we would read it from paper and print which is proven to be absorbed much more efficiently than when we read from a screen of pixels.
When we become lazy from having too much convenience in life, we are also loosing out ability to be creative. Imagine you decide you want to learn the different names of tree's, what the leaves look like and how the wood looks.

How many people would go buy a book about tree's and then go for the day to a forest to find the trees in the book?

How many people would not even move, and open a window (not for fresh air, I meant a new windows window!) and type in "names of trees" and not even leave the house?

If we just sit in a house we loose our creativeness, we might not have even had a chance to have found it yet because we are just sitting in house's or a work place most of the time for our whole lives. To add the fatigue with this from being physically less active and the mild depression that everyone has from looking at the smartphone for so many years already, is turning us into basically just like that film Idiocracy and making everyone sick.

Thinking ends up as STRESS!

If you haven't noticed already that the more you think about something the more it builds up into a "problem" (even though its still just a thought and not a problem at all) and so we can see that thinking creates problems. We all know (I hope) that problems creates the stress we are having more and more off each day. When we are using Smartphone's so often as we do with this morn day habit, we overload our minds with completely useless information, and mostly as I said earlier peoples ego's. This is all we have now as our input these days - endless scrolls of adverts and peoples mental sufferings.