Taking a break from technology
He lived for five days out at sea with no Internet. really!
“MY boyfriend’s average screen time this week was 14 minutes a day.”
Two weeks ago, someone somewhere sent this tweet, and my phone thought it important that I know this had happened. But even with no knowledge of who the poster was, the tweet hit a sore spot.
Once, possibly 15 years ago, my own statistic would not have been too far from this. Now I was averaging almost six hours of screen time a day, or a third of the time I spend awake.
Much like most people I know, I use my smartphone to do just about everything. Two weeks ago, when I got sick, I asked it questions about my symptoms, all while sniffling into a tissue in my sheets – to the detriment of my increasingly stiff neck and bleary eyes.
In the same week that I read that tweet, fate – in the form of my mother’s birthday – thrust upon me an opportunity to shake this curse. The Yong family was going on a five-day cruise (whether we liked it or not, according to my mother).
On board, I was shocked to realise that the Wifi – the free provision of which should by now be enshrined as a fundamental right, surely – was payable. At between US$20 and US$30 (RM89 and RM134)!
There was not much to and fro between my sister and I before we decided it was unconscionable to pay that amount of money for Internet access – probably what the cruise intended anyway, we thought: to create a bubble on the water in which people had no choice but to have fun with the activities available on board.
Yet, in that moment, deep in the embers of my Internet-over-reliant soul, I would be remiss to not mention a glimmer of excitement because this was the golden ticket back to a world before I succumbed to the Internet.
Finally, I was returning to a state of nature, Rousseau style!
I put down my phone, checked the hard-copy catalogue for activities on board and made plans – with pen on paper, for good measure – as a symbol of my return to an Edenic, pre-technology century.
Over the next few days, through the nighttime song-and-dance shows, the water sports, the complimentary three-course meals, I noticed changes in my behaviour and temperament.
Without an Internet connection, the phone stayed in my pocket for longer stretches of time when I was out of the cabin, rather than being placed screen-up on the dinner table or even just held in my hand when walking.
At meals, I began participating more wholeheartedly in conversations. By the pool, I could read for extended stretches of time without any distracting notifications buzzing or even the impulse to check the time.
And in the morning, rather than having the screen force light into my eyes first thing, I wiggled my toes awake and plodded to the balcony to take in the fresh ocean air.
One evening, my family and I took an evening stroll on the deck and fortuitously caught the most gorgeous sunset.
We took some photos, but after that settled into deckchairs and watched the lightly pulsating ball of light sink and change the colours of the sky around it.
Taking in the mottled ocean and the swirling clouds, I suddenly understood Impressionism, an art style I had always found cloying previously.
I wanted to know the names of all the colours, noticing for the first time the shades of orange, russet, gold, copper and pink that make up a sunset.
By the end of the five-day trip, my average daily screen time was an hour. A single charge of my phone battery lasted three days, compared with half a day before the cruise.
More importantly, I felt more at ease, rested. It was a proper vacation.
A week after returning to shore, my screen time is once more at four hours a day, and there is mild panic – that my experiment had come to nought, and that I will never be able to regain that feeling of being exactly where I needed to be that I had enjoyed out at sea.
But I also knew that the hour of screen time a day was impossible to replicate in real life. As a journalist, I have an innate interest in the goings-on around the world, something I need for my work. More practically, I have to respond to colleagues, arrange meetings with contacts and get on calls to clarify things with newsmakers.
With the ease of connectivity back on land, I was also once more on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok. I was on Whatsapp and Telegram. I was using transport and food delivery apps. All of these edged up my screen time, even if each use was only for a few minutes.
My solution has been to pay more attention to each time I pick up and unlock my phone, asking myself whether I really need to Google something that instant. Can that message be replied to together with others that will stream in later? Do I really have to take a photo of this really funny poster? (Although in that instance, the answer was an unequivocal yes.)
My fatigue with technology is not unique. While many surveys show Gen Z folks (defined by Oxford as those born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s) still spending many hours online, a few reports are emerging of social media fatigue in this group. Data published by the Us-based Pew Research Center shows that users between 18 and 25 years old are the only age group to see a decrease in social media use since 2019.
Anecdotally, I can see that people my age are posting less on Instagram. Extended texting has become something to avoid, and people are centring their mental and physical health more, preferring to carve out personal time to go to the beach, hit the gym, do some yoga or meditate.
For the rest of the year, I am joining the movement to ditch the phone. If I have to, I will hide it behind my bookshelf so it does not even enter my consciousness, as I did when I first started work and was immediately added to six group chats.
I invite you to join me. – The Straits Times/asia News Network
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