Digital wellness and 'being'
PSA: If you have tried to contact me via WhatsApp or calls, this is the situation since last Thursday my phone took a swim! Actually, that sounds so chilled.
What happened was that I woke up at 2am, there was no Zesa (electricity), and I used my phone as a torch to go to the loo. While trying to put it away so I could take a pee, my sleepy self fumbled the phone, and it took a dive into the toilet. I then retrieved it and tossed it into a bucket of clean water to give it a rinse, because who wants a pee-soaked phone, right?! Well it made perfect sense at the time!
Ordinarily, this dip would not have been an issue because S10s are water-resistant, can shoot under water, etc. but my 4-year-old phone had a hole in the LCD, so it literally drowned. I just wiped the outside and went back to bed. In the morning, I put it in rice, but what struck me was how at peace I was with the whole incident.
I lost 100gb of videos, photos, notes, poems, voice notes of ideas, and other data, but as I reflected on all that, I found an amazing sense of calm in the midst of what is technically a catastrophe. And the realization I came to was that perhaps this is exactly what I was praying for. As a serial overthinker, I tend to horde information, data etc. and the sum result of that is an overload of the same.
So I reconciled that this 'accident' is the Universe giving me exactly what I needed: Peace. I was constipated with information, and the phone drowning in the loo was the laxative *cough cough*. Now the irony of this is not lost to me that I took the picture of my rice-entombed phone with another mobile device, yet there lies the oxymoron in it all. The downgrade to the Tecno Spark 7 I am currently using has me feeling a tad elitist because it really is not for me. It freezes, can’t multi-task, has a decent camera and only trumps my fallen gadget with the really good battery life.
The work I do requires a robust device with blazing speed and processing power on-the-go. It’s the utility for me and not the popularity metrics that matter, having long-since found a way to inculcate digital devices into my workflow and ecosystem. However, ‘doom-scrolling’ and high data consumption with said gadgets is almost a given if you are not disciplined and mindful of how you use them, adding another layer of complexity to the digital device discussion.
Today’s gadgets even come with a digital well-being app which monitors how much screen time and app usage you’re racking up on a daily to monthly basis; indicating that is more to this brave new world than just the ‘technological advancements’ and algorithms.
But seriously, we spend so much time on our devices immersed in this digital world, craving to be connected when, in fact, we get further and further away from ourselves in the process. We are caught up in cycles of consuming content, mindless trends, magnifying insecurities, breeding envy and losing ourselves in this alternate reality.
Being 'introverted' self-absorbed has never been easier or monetized to such lengths as is the current status quo; our generally gregarious, social nature playing a distant second to self-involved, dopamine-sapping triggers and time-consuming rabbit holes in myriad forms of ‘applications’ distractions.
This week has been quite revelatory in the context of self-discovery, self-worth, self-care and being alone with oneself. I discovered I am handy with a hammer, I fabricated a home-made saw, and I did some spring cleaning too. My garden was also in dire need of TLC, or rather, I was in dire need of the cathartic effects of being in the presence of all that green and disconnecting.
Consequently, have we reached the stage in our humanity where we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t as far as technology is concerned? I urge anyone who has read this far to take time off from their gadgets, enforce the same with their children if you have any and spend more time with themselves.
It's the detox you didn't know you needed. Thank me later.
Happy Faraiday.
