How to Dial Back Your Screen Time and Survive Social Media in Quarantine

Technology is neutral by itself, and how we use that tool matters. 

• An email is a great tool, which completely transformed how an office works, though it wasn’t designed for offices.
• Similarly, the Facebook Like button was designed as a shortcut to writing a good comment, but it unexpectedly turned out to be a tool to measure the popularity of a post.

Spending time alone with your thoughts is extremely crucial, but is increasingly difficult. When you sit with yourself and understand your thought stream you structure your experiences and create a ‘bridge’ of your life and where you want to go.

Without spending solitary time with ourselves we are just adrift with where pop culture, media, and the attention economy takes us.

One of the hidden dangers of technology is how your complex thoughts can be distilled and shortened into an emoji (like a heart or a thumbs up).

Most people, especially youngsters, are not being articulate with their feelings when they have readymade shortcuts to convey their emotions.

There is a misguided notion that speed and efficiency are inherently better. For a few things, fast is fine (like a faster dish cleaner). Being exposed to information in a faster way isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Example: Replying to emails faster and quicker isn’t really optimizing the work, and only increases the pseudo-work in the long run.