The digital trap
I went out last night with a couple of friends in Bangkok. They’ve both lived here for over 10 years. They told me it used to be very different, “back then”. Things were of course much cheaper. The main thing that they were lamenting though is that there used to be a lot more people out socialising.
If there’s any drop off in activity you wouldn’t know it, especially coming from sleepy (at times) Melbourne. But they assure me that the bars used to be packed with young people. What’s changed? Well the cost has made it prohibitively expensive for younger people to go out, and then there’s social media and smart phones. According to my friends diagnosis, people are just spending so much time on social media and dating apps, that they don’t feel the need or have the desire to go out and meet people the old fashioned way.
That seems to be the trend not just in Bangkok, but all over the world.
The average person spends 144 minutes on social media per day, 72 hours per month. For a total of 5.7 years over their lifetime!
I’m not against social media, I use it and it’s a useful tool. But two hours a day? It’s making many of us sick. There is a direct link between social media usage and poor mental health.
Life doesn’t go on forever. It feels that way when you’re very young, so throwing away 2 hours a day on Instagram and Tiktok doesn’t worry you as much. It’s only when you get older that you’ll look back and see that time was wasted. When you could have been doing more meaningful things with your time.
I did the same thing in my late teenage years and early 20’s. I would think nothing of spending all day playing video games. I felt immortal. I wasn’t getting older, I was getting bigger and stronger. What was there to worry about? My prime was somewhere way into the future.
But your prime in physical fitness (at least) comes a lot earlier in life than you think. What a shame to use that time behind a screen. More than a shame, what a waste.
I’ll stop my ranting though, what are the solutions?
I think the starting point is to realise how damaging living in a digital bubble can be. Especially when it comes at the cost of real in person interactions.
From there you might consider putting in some limits. If there are particular apps on your phone that you seem to be compulsively checking all the time, just delete them. I fell into the trap myself recently, I was constantly checking my stock portfolio. I’d pick up my phone to look at something else and somehow end up looking at stock prices. And what was that achieving? Absolutely nothing other than making me fret over meaningless stock price movements. So I deleted it.
If you can’t control it, then just delete it.
They design these apps specifically to monopolise your attention. They want you to spend as much time as possible on there, so that they can capture your data and sell you stuff. I don’t blame them, I like capitalism. I like Coca-cola too, doesn’t mean I drink 2L of it a day. One glass once in a while is fine.
The digital world we have created keeps us engaged in a very narrow bandwidth. It separates us from our senses, and everything that is within us at depth. It separates us too from others. Walk into a coffee shop or even a restaurant these days and notice how many people are staring at their phones. All that does is ramp up your mind, more and more. Before you know it, your mind is racing. A runaway freight train, that becomes dangerous to you and the people around you. And that is incredibly damaging because happiness, real happiness and enjoyment of life comes from being able to step back from the mind and be still.
Most of the time there’s actually no reason to think. And yet we go on with it, trapped in a endless stream of thoughts. Social media and entertainment interrupts this stream of thoughts and in that sense gives us a break. But it is an artificial break and once you put the device down, the thinking machine gets reactivated with even more force.
So the question is what do you want to be connected to? A digital device, or life itself that flows through all of us. Sure you can do both, but if you are trapped in the digital world, it will leave little space for that deeper level to come in. It is from that deeper level that a true sense of peace and happiness comes. And that leads to..
Solution number 2, meditate.
Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and just as soon as you wake up your mind starts to race? All the worries about your job, your relationship, your health start to flood in. Sometimes that happens to me, and this is what I did recently to still my mind. Perhaps it will work for you too.
Take a couple of deep breaths and follow the breath in and out. Feel the sensation as your belly and chest expand. Then go through each of your senses and notice what you are feeling. What can you see, probably just darkness but perhaps there’s some light coming in from the edges of the window. What do you hear, a car going past. Taste and smell. Then move your attention into your body. Feel where you are making contact with your pillow and your bed. Move through each part of your body from head to toe, spend a few moments in each area and try to be aware of the sensation there. If there’s any tension try to release it.
If you’ve woken up worrying in the middle of the night and started to think about things, there may be some residual anxiety, worry or frustration that you feel. Try not to label anything you find as good or bad, but become aware of that residue. Perhaps it’s sitting in your stomach, or you feel it in your chest. Whatever you find there try your best to accept it.
As you go through this process thoughts will come flying in. That’s fine, just view them exactly like birds flying around in the sky. You may get taken in by some of these thoughts and find that your attention goes into that stream of thought. If so just nudge your attention back to your breathing, then your body.
After some time fewer and fewer thoughts will come up. Like an echo that becomes fainter and fainter. Then they may stop altogether for a few moments. You will be left in silence. Just enjoy that as you lay there.
At this point you can just naturally drift back into sleep. Even if your mind kicks into gear and you start fretting again, you will have been successful in quieting your mind and in doing so realised something important. You can exist without thinking. So are you the mind, or something else?
I haven’t answered that yet. I’ve got as far as being able to quiet my mind periodically as described above. When I’ve gotten further, I’ll let you know.
When I was a kid I loved watching Star Wars and reading Lord of the Rings. On some level I expected to step into an adventure like that when I reached adulthood. Instead I found that adult life was often mundane. I’ve done my best to make it not so. Living in various places and challenging myself. But what I’ve now realised is that the true adventure is not without but within. Having said that, an outer adventure does help things along. As Eckhart Tolle says, "I've never heard of anybody who awakens in their comfort zone."