So with finals over and summer officially beginning, I thought to myself that with all this free time, I'll be able to do all the things I have been wanting to do, such as:
1. Reading (I have a lot of unread books on my bookshelf)
2. Writing (particularly journaling) ![]()
3. Yoga
4. Going to the Beach
5. Spending Time with Friends
Basically, I don't want to find myself spending all of my time in one spot studying for the majority of the day, like I have been doing, along with other college students throughout the country, for the past few months, which is impossible because it's summer.
Looking at the list, everything looks fine and dandy, but unfortunately, the only handicap that is standing in the way of my plans is...
Technology.
Internet addiction is something I'm starting to recognize as a familiar and rising epidemic. It starts off quite innocently, with finding some spare time on your hands. At that moment in time, you are not with your friends, talking. You have forgotten that interesting new book you were reading; you don't have any homework to do. Whatever the case was, you found yourself bored.
Just out of curiosity, you decide to take out your phone, and a few minutes later after surfing the Web, you feel slightly sad about having to putting it down. Soon that little scroll between internet browsers increases from five minutes to 10. Then 15, 20, 30, an hour. Pretty soon, you are spending all your free time on technology, whether listening to music, watching a video, or scrolling through your Facebook feed.
Then one day, you decide to take a break from homework by getting on your phone. The next thing you know, it's hours later into the night and you have no time to finish whatever assignment you were doing - it was going to have to wait until tomorrow before school or in between classes. It finally escalates to taking your phone to bed, spending hours on YouTube until it's 1 a.m. or later and you go to bed tired, drowsy and guilty. Your experience of descending into technology might not have been like this, sorry - this was just from my personal experience.
We internet addicts go by day by day promising ourselves that we won't get on and do something else during our free time, and for a few days, it might work. We thwart ourselves away, but we somehow come crawling back to it. We go in thinking that we'll be able to log off at any time like:
But at the end we're like:
This has happened too many times for many of us, and some, maybe all of us, are tired of it. At this point, we're just asking ourselves:
And guess what?
I'm going to find answers. And that is where I must leave off to gather research to fully explain this phenomenon. The internet can be used for good, but first we must know how our brains function when on technology. Stay tuned for next week.
