LIFE SEEMED MORE REAL BEFORE WE WENT VIRTUAL

AT THE end of each day, my laptop computer flashes a message to me telling me how much time I’ve spent in front of that little screen during that day.

And every day I’m mildly shocked by the information. Could I really have spent more than four hours staring at that plastic screen?

That’s almost a quarter of my entire waking day! And the gloomy thought that crosses my mind is that, after all that lost time, I am no cleverer, happier, healthier or richer than I was when I crept out of bed early this morning to cringe before another day.

Some numbers might have changed during the day — more people were found to have Covid-19 today than yesterday.

More taxi drivers were killed in Cape Town today than yesterday, we experienced different temperature to those we felt yesterday and several politicians announced that they were “concerned”. (Being concerned seems to be the politicians’ main function these days.)

Apart from these minor adjustments, I seem to have gained very little from my hours of screen time.

Of course, there were the advertisements too, and I could probably have chosen any of six funeral policies or taken out any of four easy loans, even if I was blacklisted (I’m not).

In this electronic age we rely on electric circuitry for almost everything we do, from chatting to our families to paying our bills and taxes and keeping track of our health.

I often wonder whether our quality of life is any better than it was before the world went electronic.

We paid bills by writing cheques. We communicated by posting letters. We paid for that communication by buying stamps to stick on our letters.

We kept track of our health by the way our bodies felt – not by some numbers on a tiny screen.

Somehow, life seemed a little more real before we went digital and “virtual”.

And, importantly, we could navigate our way along the bumpy road of life without having to remember a dozen different passwords.

Passwords are like the secret handshakes of cult societies.

I preferred it when we trusted each other to be who we claimed to be. A signature used to be proof enough.