21st-Century Problems

I write a lot about mindfulness, which is why the irony of this post isn't lost on me. If you're reading this, you almost certainly own at least a computer, cell phone, or tablet (and maybe all three). They entertain us, educate us, and can bring us almost any physical object we desire if our credit line is high enough. I'd be lost without my devices, and I'm sure you may fall in the same boat. But, as much different as our world looks now than it did 100 years ago, it hasn't changed that much.

Nature is still here. Friendships are still here. Love is still here. Taste, sound, sight, they're all still here. Adventures, music, food, they're all still here.

But do we ever REALLY experience them anymore?

Sure, sometimes we're completely present. We have conversations, eat in restaurants (well, we used to), and take walks. But most of the time our cell phones are still visible, or nearby. We may even take them out to fully capture the experience with a picture. It's very rare that we're completely unplugged for more than an hour a day (and I'm more guilty of this than anyone).

A quote I saw the other day really hit the nail on the head for me: we are scrolling ourselves out of awareness.

So much of our day is spent browsing, watching, or reading. On our devices. Away from the rest of the world, which has been there waiting all along. We tilt our heads up and realize a half hour passed, a half hour that we'll never get back. Let's imagine that we use an hour of every day (VERY low estimate for the majority of us, I have an excuse since I run my business off of my phone but my daily phone screentime is around 8 hours/day). 365 hours equals 15.2 days of time per year spent on your phone. If you do twice that, that's a whole month of mindlessness. Double that is two months worth of our twelve months out of every year (and four hours isn't a high estimate for many of us). These numbers are staggering as I'm calculating them, and should serve as a wakeup call for all of us (myself included) to stop spending so much time away from the life that's happening while we scroll.

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. When we're old and wrinkled, I doubt we'll look back and wish we spent more time engulfed in our technology, away from our friends, family, and the nature that surrounds us all. Will we wish we more in tune with the news, Hive, and Instagram? Or will we wish we talked with our loved ones more, listened to the birds, and took more nature walks? There's nothing wrong with being tuned in, but in the end it will matter how much we tuned out.

"A Single Seed" is my attempt to get out one idea every day that I've learned or accumulated over the years, with the hope that it may stick in someone else's memory bank as well. The idea may be related to fitness, business, life, or philosophy, but I think you'll find that many can change domains if you wish them to. With each seed planted, a new life awaits.

Image credit: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/923362