Sleep Screen: Time lost in a rabbit hole

By on July 15, 2021
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Sleep Screen: Time lost in a rabbit hole

Are we bargaining more in the name of digital era? Have we forgotten what life outside the screen is like?

Consider a farmer in central India a couple of centuries ago: mud house, small farm, clean air, stream water, fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs, cattle, blue skies, white clouds. Heaven on earth…

Today, as I sit back and ponder, I see blue skies more often on my cell phone screen. The fruit and vegetables are perhaps sprayed with insecticide as is my mind. The water I drink has chlorine (to say the least) if not plastic; even KMnO4 (potassium permanganate) is added to our well.

The devolution of the human mind is obvious and this is the sincere effort to make it ‘evolve’. I will try to follow this devolution, though not in the strict chronological order nor in the trigonometric proportions.

From stone age to agricultural farming, man developed by settling down. ‘Wheat became the ruler of humans’ is explicitly explained by Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens. But what followed was worse: the accumulation and insecurity, the violence to protect possessions. In 3000BC, in Medieval Europe and other parts of the agricultural world, the land was to the tiller ‘for that monsoon’, not forever. Today, fanatic accumulation has citizens owning properties in faraway lands that they have not seen.

Grain accumulation resulted in counting wealth that lead to the disaster of gold nuggets, coins, paper cash, banks cheques, credit/debit cards and now even micro currency for micro minds.

To protect the pseudo lands, armies were created. Some fought wars while others did not even touch a weapon. I am told that most Swiss soldiers retire without shooting any human.

To keep these strong humans engaged, we invented sports that has now turned into battle fields of unreasonable competition of physical show and money or wealth. Most children are stuck to screens and their parents and non-parental adults, guardians, from social media to educational classes from video games to porn. Screen time varies from 10-15 minutes to a whopping six-eight hours. The average is four to five hours a day.

Somewhere in the last one decade the brain centres of humans have become digitised. The whole day consists of 86,400 seconds. Life is made of seconds not years or decades. If four-five hours of the day are on the screen and seven to eight hours are spent asleep, we lose every alternate day of our lives to SS (sleep screen).

It’s not a joke, friends, but a scream. It is reducing the lifetime like a cancer. The screen time of most of us show the amount of time spent on entertainment, social media, news, education, etc. Most spend more than 50 per cent time of screen time on useless activities. It’s time to wake up. There’s a beautiful world of nature out there. The skies, the clouds, the streams, the mountains, the waves and breeze are all waiting for us and it’s real. Love it, live it, or scream it down the screen (SS); the choice is ours.   


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