I will be the first to advocate for technology and social media. The technological boom that has exploded over the last couple of decades has done countless good things to grow us individually as people and collectively as a culture. Our phones put us just a couple of clicks away from both news and entertainment. Facebook connects us and provides almost unlimited access to the people and things that we care about. Twitter is a pool of limitless voices and ideas, all compact in 140 characters or less. LinkedIn has made networking within industries and connecting with professionals easier than it's ever been. I could go on for days.
However, while we've come so far in some ways, we've taken several steps backward in others.
When was the last time you went out to dinner and didn't take out your phone to check for updates? When was the last time you let your phone die and decided not to charge it? I'm willing ti bet that it's been a while
The average person checks their phone 46 times per day, and that number is on a fast upward trend. Indeed, in the CNN special documentary "#Being13: Inside the Secret Life of Teens," post-millennials demonstrate some of the most extreme instances of this. Many in a study of hundreds of eighth graders from across the U.S. admit to compulsively checking their phones between 100 and 200 times every day.
We can't get through the day without feeling the need to be constantly connected. We can't sit through a face-to-face conversation without the interruption of social media's persistent call, constantly pulling our focus. We're too busy trying to document moments that we forget to actually live them. We're cultivating our lives inside of news feeds and shaping our identities around status updates and Instagram photos, but life outside of the screen has become somewhat of an afterthought, only acknowledged when we have no other choice.
What's worse than the crippling social side effects of the constant bombardment of social media and technology are the health risks that the immersive social culture is stimulating. Alongside reported decreases in the quality of relationships, happiness and self-worth, excessive screen time is also linked to physical discomfort, weight gain, headaches, eye strain and even nausea. Some of the teenagers documented in "#Being13" exhibited symptoms that strongly parallel with signs of clinical addiction. Psychology Today even claims that too much time staring at a screen can, in severe cases, also causes brain damage as the large amount of digital activity physically restructures the matter that makes up the brain.
I'm not saying that it's necessary to purge all of the technological and social pleasures to which we've become accustomed. We've been afforded a great privilege with how far we've come, and there are bounties of benefits to these luxuries socially, politically, professionally and otherwise. What I am saying, though, is to take a step back and use the short time you have to actually live instead focusing your attention on posting about living.
Think about it for a second. If the average American spends 4.7 hours on their phone a day, how much more living would we get to experience if we just put the screens down? Instead of fussing over framing, capturing, editing and posting a photo of our dinner on Instagram, we'd have the chance to eat it while it's still hot. If we just hit mute on the notifications of the 12 group conversations we're trying to keep up with, we can focus our attention on the person sitting right in front of us. There's life outside of cyberspace, and stepping outside of it and focusing on all that's around us has profound effects on us socially and medically.
Posting about health doesn't make you healthy, and existing inside a stream doesn't constitute the ability to adapt socially to the physical situations beyond the screen.
The end goal is this: Live in a way that your statuses and photos can't capture. Interact with the physical world around you so that you might actually have something worthy of posting. Live beyond 140 characters.
