Well, there’s only so much I can actually complain about the situation.
You know, “Oh, things are not ideal.
What’s happening is gonna cause all these problems.” I mean, you can go on and on talking about all the ways that something is a problem, but eventually you just have to get around to what are you going to do about it.
So I do believe that there is always a positive silver lining, and even though sometimes you really have to reach, but so much of this isolation that is so big right now, it really is just the acceleration of something that’s been going on for a long time, that we have been, even without official orders telling us to stay at home, we have been staying at home more, doing more behind a screen.
And even when we’re outside, even with friends, how often do you see friends mutually looking at their personal screens.
So this is the situation in general, and not only with the official lockdown order.
We are locking ourselves down by choice, and we have been, ever since the screen life has been taking over.
So as much as I can complain about it, what can we actually do? Well, of course, one thing is to say let’s take a break from screens, of course, so we can limit how much we are living in the electronic world.
And, you know, it’s worth remembering that there is actually a real physical world out there.
Often easy to forget when that rectangular screen becomes the centre of our day.
But it seems helpful to continually remind myself that oh yeah, there is actually a real world, and you know, today the sun is actually shining, and there is actually a real physical world with bright sunlight, and there’s there’s trees and there’s water, sky.
There’s all these things that, you know, I guess they seem kind of old-fashioned now.
Maybe that’s taking it too far, but, you know, these things are still out there.
And that’s up to us to be able to remember those things, and just forget about the orders of lockdown that, you know- in the sense that we can’t blame our immersion in the artificial screen world, we can’t blame it on a contagion.
We can’t blame it on lockdown orders.
We can’t blame it on anyone but ourselves for choosing to live this way.
But the silver lining, you could say, the good thing, is that when we blame something on ourselves, the good thing about that is that, well, maybe we can actually do something about it.
Whereas if we blame the situation on something entirely outside our control, maybe we can just feel like we’re just passively accepting it and we can’t do anything about it anyway.
So there is a real world out there, and we have the ability to be part of that real world.
We have it within our power to choose how much we want to be electronic.
Now, during this temporary period of lockdown, we are being pushed more towards the extreme of it, and so we may be stuck with it for a while, but as these restrictions come off, we have the choice of how much we’re going to remain inside electronic world.
And maybe this kind of extreme diet of heavy electronic screen life is something that can even push us, you know, out of it, because we’re just so sick of it.
Now I don’t know if this actually works as a strategy, but you know, if you are hooked on smoking, you know, one of those strategies was to just like force yourself to smoke an entire pack, and then you just find it so disgusting you never want to smoke again.
Probably not a great idea.
But maybe that is a little bit like what this is.
You know, let’s say you love to eat cookies, so you force yourself to eat an entire pack of cookies, the entire cookie jar, and now the thought of cookies is no longer pleasant to you.
Now, it doesn’t seem like this actually works as a strategy.
But maybe this is something like what’s happening to us now, that we are now forced to spend so much time behind these screens, that maybe by the end of it we will decide that we’ve had enough.
So temporarily, we are under these orders to live in screenworld, but we have the choice, and maybe it’s simply up to us to see: how much do we want to live in screenworld, and how much do we want to live in the sun, sky, trees and water world? Well, that will be up to us.
#screentime #screenworld #realworld