STRESS! BURN OUT! Can digital detox help?
We are living in a modern environment and it is here to stay. Is digital detox the right way forward?
I feel stressed out!
I am anxious.
I am getting a burn out at my job.
How come all of a sudden everyone is more distressed while simultaneously living in the most comfort-oriented phase of our civilisation?
It was only a couple of decades past when the men and women and even minors were stuffed with a lot of labour-intensive work; working in the fields, working in industries, and yet, stress was the least of their concerns. What is the issue then?
Recently, I got a text from a friend saying she was getting drained in her job. Some would argue that she is working in the most success-driven work ethic that this modern industry has provided. You work for someone in exchange of money. Pretty easy to understand, right?
But wait a second!
Remove all the human interaction and make that work mostly, if not entirely, dependent on virtual modes of communication. Now, there you have it, a recipe for disaster…
Were we meant to be spending so much time on the tele, on laptops or on our pocket devices? Research says other wise; but isn’t it already too late for scientists, technologists and philosophers to be coming out with this proposition? They are not living in a world that the 20 year old lives in. Those are two separate realities. Nearly the better part of humanity is already hooked to the net. The work we do, the relations we maintain, the experiences we share are all conducted on these devices. Our collective and individual memory is linked and stored on these devices. These have become our digital extensions, to the point that without them we are nothing.
But hang on a minute, what does that imply then? Who are we? What are we experiencing? Is our experience our own?
Maybe the best person in the room to give that advice would be the scarcely heard of Canadian Professor Marshall McLuhan, who said, ‘the medium is the message.’
The digital multimedia is imprinting the messages of the sponsors onto our brain, where each individual is merely a receiver in that sense. Every visual that hits our eyeballs creates an imprint; a virtual imprint that has nothing to do with our immediate surrounding, our immediate reality, but nonetheless, we have no say in this. Our brains are not our own. Our thoughts are not our own. We are instantly living in the world of the ones who have sponsored those messages. It is necessary that we make an effort to understand what this means to us.
There has been a lot of chatter about people smart enough to use AI, being at the top of the food chain, but the technologist Jaron Lanier, who in fact is called the father of virtual reality, puts a good case.
“Aren’t we becoming dumb in order to make the AI smart?”, he says.
The answer is obvious. Moreover, the skills that were passed on through the generations have gone extinct in the matter of a few years. Everyone is a content creator and the receiver is simply and information gatherer. We are gathering useless information all day long instead of having a wholesome life experience.
So, lets ask ourselves this question, what was it different about the people who toiled on the fields?
One answer might be, that they were self-sufficient and hence less dependant on the state or other forms of capital. They were always experiencing things immediately, and barring the distraction of cultural events, which played a huge role in community building btw, they were never really distracted. You had fifty genuine people next to you who could talk to you about life, sharing experiences, making memories, rather than having ten thousand “followers” and still feeling lonely.
It is a cruel experiment being played on the human mind and it is here to stay. The only sad part is, we are giving in without even putting a fight. We are giving in without testing out true potential. So, to my friend and to you in your 20’s, 30’s or even 50’s feeling a burnt out, it’s not you, it’s your device.
We simply aren’t giving enough time for things to happen at their natural pace. Keep it aside and you will see a whole different world that doesn’t care about your job, or the number of followers, or the gossip. It is, and simply is. It is thriving in a few places, but exceedingly waning out in most. Its nature, its what the ancients called mother, dao, and we call it earth.
In the words of ethno-botanist Terence McKenna,
“the drama of a dying world has been turned into a soap opera for most people”
Only a few days of digital detox - a term that should be widely uses these days - can create mindfulness, a sense of mental peace. Not mindfulness to fuel some baba or modern day self-help guru’s ego-trip or material ambitions, but something for your own sanity, that which is truly yours!
Can we do that?
I know that the answer would overwhelmingly be, “NO! Are you nuts? Give me pills, maybe drugs even, but leaving my phone aside for a few days? Who lives without a phone brother? That is crossing a limit. ”
Maybe I am asking you to cross your limits, but you will soon realise how easy it was to back to reality; to what nature produced. You had the key in your pocket all along and you searched the entire house to find it..
Happy searching my friend..
“I know you're tired but come, this is the way.”
― Jalalu'l-din Rumi
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