Have you thought about your cellphone usage? How much is too much?
“Female college students spend an average of 10 hours a day on their cellphones and male college students spend nearly eight,” according to a Baylor University study on cellphone activity published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions. Think about a ‘young’ person on their own, now try to imagine them without a cell phone in their hand. You rarely see it, most of the time, the youth of today have cell phones 24/7, but obviously it wasn’t always that way.
Think back to when you saw an old person on their own, rarely a cellphone in sight. It seems our generation cannot just ‘be’ anymore, there is a constant need for stimulus, for something to look at, something to do, something to satisfy our dwindling attention span.
Technology has tremendous benefits, nobody argues otherwise, but I do believe we have pushed it too far. The endless introduction of newer forms of technological stimulus into the consumer world are proving more frequent, and combined with such astronomical amounts of hype, I’m not even sure it is our fault anymore.
The point here is not cellphone addiction, the point here is time spent on cellphones verses time spent thinking. Think about your own daily life, how often do you just sit and ‘be’? Thinking about all the different elements that make up your life, the world you live in, the people you know, how you got here, what you want to do, where you want to go, what makes you happy, what makes you sad, why you do the things you do each and every day.
In some cases the answer might be a lot, but judging by my own habits and the cellphone habits I observe day in day out, it is probably not a great deal.
Technology can do wonderful things: it can bring new people together from all over the globe; it can supply us with copious amounts of information that years ago we could only dream of; it allows families to stay connected no matter where in the world they may be. The list of possibilities are endless, to sit and name more would simply be an injustice to sheer brilliance of technology.
But has technology drowned out our will to think, our will to explore our own thoughts? I’m not trying to answer this question; I am simply drawing attention to it, if more of us at least raise the question to ourselves, it, if anything, seems like a positive.
It might be that people don’t see any value in just thinking anymore, in taking the time to just 'be.' Perhaps we believe that time is better spent doing something deemed more productive, or goal orientated. But there has to be some weight in the argument that, spending time thinking about the wealth of elements that make up a persons life is worth spending significant time thinking about.
Not only that, but thinking about elements of life that might not necessarily be primarily relevant to every individual but may be relevant to expanding the mind, which may indeed prove relevant in discovering things, such as, new curiosities or passions.
I have no intention of sparking a debate about cellphone addiction, nor am I trying to be really philosophical, I am merely raising the question in the hope that people ask themselves: Do I just think enough? Does my time spent on my cellphone retract the time I should spend on other things? Has cellphone use as a whole just got out of hand? Do I even want to think more or am I happy with the amount of time I spend on my cellphone verses just thinking?
Again, don’t think that there isn’t an element of hypocrisy here, because I myself am aware that I spend too much time on my cell phone and not enough time thinking and reading. However, becoming aware of it at least puts me one step closer to deciding whether or not I want to spend more time thinking or reading. Just food for thought.
