Let’s talk screentime!

I have recently watched “the social dilemma” on netflix and I am shook. If you have not seen it yet, please let it be what you watch next. You won’t regret it. We all know we are addicted to our phone, literal slaves to it but to learn how we got to this point is really something that stunned me. Personally, I am addicted to twitter more than any other social app. I am not on facebook, the other two apps I use a lot are Whatsapp and Instagram. Even with just these, my screen time is scary.

As funny as the meme comparing instagram to refrigerator is, it is but the truth and a harsh one at that. The constant need to check phone for notifications every 20 minutes or for some even sooner is downright addiction. One could understand if this was when you are awaiting a reply, however most of the times we are checking our phones for no reason and somehow yet, we always have a notification! Now, why we have a notification everytime we check is something the movie explains. I am clearly not telling anything we don’t already know, the real deal is what can we do about this? I have conciously cut down my time on instagram and my daily average still shows at 58minutes which seems like a lot to me. However, with no where to go (thanks covid) I guess that is the best average I can hope for. But this was my struggle with just one app. I have notifications on for twitter and I am checking tweets every hour, I am on whatsapp a lot more than what we call as ideal time and now I have a new friend called YouTube which is hard to resist.

How exactly are we suppose to go “notification off” suddenly? The need to stay updated and know what is going on supercedes everything else. How to resist this temptation and not be a “user”? I am really open to suggestions here, every little thing might help. Personally this is what I have been following for sometime now as opposed to keeping the notifications off:

• Keep phone on silent without the vibration mode except for calls

• Keep phone at a distance where every notification pop up is not visible

• Subscribe to news letters which carry daily news updates and read those instead of having notifications on for every single tweet

• Explore activities which do not involve looking at screen, example some of these for me are painting, cooking, dancing and reading.

These might sound very basic and I am yet to know if it helps but I am looking forward to getting more suggestions, if any?

Leaving you with a quote from Elon Musk which I find very interesting, “AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity – if AI has a goal and humanity just happens to come in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it, no hard feelings”