You shouldn't have kept reading. I warned you to stop and you didn't listen. You were curious and probed on to discover what you’d find. To read these words.

Well… Good for you.

So, now that you’re here, lets talk about you. What did you do today? Let me guess: This morning you woke up and immediately put your phone to your hand. You probably ate breakfast while checking your phone. Maybe you watched some television. Binge watched a few shows. Played some video games. Played around on the computer. Played on your phone. Maybe you took a pause during your meals to look up. Maybe you didn’t. Then you ended your day in front of a screen and went to bed.

Well, let me ask you this: When your grandparents were your age, what were they doing? Maybe they were planting food in their backyard. Maybe they went fishing. Maybe they even went on a hike. They could’ve been playing baseball with the other local kids in the street. Or who knows, maybe they were boring. Maybe they just sat at home and read a book, or wrote a story, or learned an instrument, or learned magic, or danced around like no one was watching. Maybe they drew pictures of a world that only their imagination could derive. Drawing pictures of mystical beasts or magical wizards– creating whole stories from thoughts and ideas and putting it all to paper to show something beautiful.

And how about your parents? What would they do on a day like today? Maybe they took pictures on polaroids, went to the local hangout with their friends, went to the park. Maybe they typed out stories on a type writer or called up a friend on the phone and talked to them for hours about nothing in particular. Maybe they read books that showed the mystical world their parents thought up in their heads, maybe they learned magic from their parents or rode bikes around the neighborhood. Maybe they did all that silly stuff you see in cartoons like leaving a burning bag of poop on a neighbors porch, or T.P.ing a house.

So, I guess my question for you is: Why did you keep reading this article? Why didn’t you just ignore it and go outside? Why didn’t you just remember how to live like your parents did, and their parents, and their parents before them? What happened to us? We so often claim we are bored because there is “nothing to do” when the whole world is at our beck-and-call and we have totally forgotten about it.

So I ask you to do this one favor, not for me, but for yourself. Do the Walden Challenge: Go a day, just one day, without using your phone, your computer, the television, anything with a screen, and return to world. Return to the way your grandparents did things and look around and make do with what your imagination gives you and not what an entertainment box or screen gifts unto you. Prove to yourself that you are your own person and can dream up ideas and entertain yourself. Be able to share something with the next generation. And be able to show your children what it means to be alive.

And maybe do your friends a favor. Share this article. And warn them not to read it. For ignorance is bliss and without knowing they’ll go unawakened and never know the blunder of their actions. But maybe, just maybe, they’ll be as defiant as you and read about how they shouldn’t have read this article…and maybe, like you, they’ll be just as glad that they did.