It is our nature to always find something to do with our leisure time. You could imagine people busy scrolling through the internet, especially when they keep saying that they are busy. It is just what it is. A lot of us have imbibed the culture of watching content while going on with our daily activities. It has become part and parcel of us.
Nowadays, you don’t need to talk to anyone or engage in any meaningful conversation before you can be preoccupied for the whole day. There is always a lot of information ready to be absorbed. You will see people moving from Facebook to TikTok, X and even Instagram without having a specific purpose of what they are looking for or what they are likely to see.
They are just doing it to feed their eyes and possibly their ego, if I may say.
But the question is, what are we really doing with ourselves? How can we make our lives better and also contribute to making our society better?
I think a lot of it has to do with our interests and what we choose to give our attention to. What we focus on gradually becomes part of us. Unfortunately, many of us are no longer moved by what is happening around us. We may know what happened in a place thousands of kilometres away, talk about celebrities we have never met, argue about people we don’t know and spend hours following events that may have little or no impact on our own lives.
Yet, we hardly know what is happening in our own communities.
We may not know the condition of the school beside our house. We may not care about the young person who is struggling to find direction. We may not be interested in what is happening to our environment or why things are getting worse around us. But give us something trending on social media and suddenly we have an opinion.
There is nothing wrong with using the internet. There is nothing wrong with watching videos, following people, reading news or entertaining ourselves. The problem begins when these things take over our attention and leave us with nothing meaningful to show for the time we have spent.
Perhaps we need to start asking ourselves what we are feeding our minds with.
What are we learning? What are we contributing? What are we creating? Who are we helping? What are we doing about the things happening around us?
Our lives cannot only be about consuming what other people have created. At some point, we also need to create, think, participate and contribute.
We need to become more conscious of where our attention goes. We need to spend more time doing things that improve our lives and the lives of people around us. Read a book. Learn something new. Talk to someone. Visit a neighbour. Teach a child. Plant something. Join a community activity. Write something. Think about a problem and see if there is something you can do about it.
We may not be able to change the whole society, but we can change something within our own little space.
Maybe making society better does not always begin with some big movement or a powerful person. Maybe it begins with ordinary people becoming more intentional about how they live, what they consume and what they give their attention to.
Because at the end of the day, our attention is one of the most important things we have. Where we put it today will, in one way or another, determine the kind of people we become tomorrow.
