Time for an e-diet

Why tell you now?

Well, maybe because even the concept might take a little getting used to. Attention spans are shorter, and distractions are many.

It’s also because Rome wasn’t built in a day and, because, as long as bells are waiting to be rung, Pavlov’s dogs are preparing to salivate.

A new year is coming soon.

And it’s time to go on a diet.

Not a low-carb diet. Not a Keto diet. Not even a fast-food diet.

No — maybe you should prepare yourself for an e-diet.

You can see the victims of the e-rich diet every day — on our roads, it takes no time at all to spot someone reading a text on their phone, even though everyone has to know by now that, in terms of road safety, text distraction is easily as dangerous as drunk driving, and far, far more common.

Almost every other person seems to be constantly on their phone: listening to music, scrolling through the internet to stave off boredom, talking. And that’s just mobile devices.

The writer of this editorial has, at the very moment of its writing, 16,903 emails in his inbox. No, sorry, now that total is 16,922. And it’s not because he’s an e-hoarder; he deleted more than 4,700 just last week.

Sent mail? Well, his current total is 2,551 messages.

And most of them, to be honest, are about matters so insignificant that, if he were any sort of important figure, future archivists would view virtually all of them as inconsequential and not worthy of saving for even a reference to the historical record. The truth of the matter is that they’re not really worth a hill of beans.

And that’s just email. Add to that text messages, Facebook messages, Tweets, Instagram posts, and it’s easy to imagine that we’re adrift in a sea as contaminated with electronic messages as the real ocean is with plastics.

We’re generating acres of bytes of e-trash, and wasting valuable time, head space and online storage in the process.

Our brains are hugely adaptable, and if we condition them to rotate through scraps of meaningless nothing, why, you can be assured they will learn to do just exactly that.

Our ability to concentrate on a single thought is fragmenting. Stop reading this and think — have you interrupted your reading to look at your phone or check an incoming email?

But all hope is not lost. Give yourself enough time away from distraction, and you too will find that you can concentrate well enough to … What? Where were we?

… to finish a complete sentence! That’s it. Why, you can even get some e-help for your e-diet. Your iPhone will track your screen time religiously, and if you go into settings, you can see how much time you’re spending looking at your phone, set guidelines for use and …

Or maybe just put the damn thing down.