Burning your eyeballs out
I was observing a twitchy bloke at the table next to me last night, and the guy didn't look at his dinner once. Not a single look. He spent the whole meal staring at a tiny, glowing rectangle, scrolling through photos of other people eating their dinner somewhere else. His eyes were completely glazed over like a dead cod.
It made me realise my own brain was starting to feel like a fried egg. I am proper sick of digital screens. I am sick of the constant, twitchy little buzz in my pocket, the blue light frying my retinas, and the absolute circus of notifications telling me about shite I do not care about.
So I bought a proper, physical notebook and a cheap plastic pen. No screen, no battery, and sod all updates.
The total potatoes back home would wet themselves if they had to go analogue for 48 hours. They are so addicted to the screen they cannot even have a shite without staring at a video of a cat falling off a sofa. They think they are connected to the world, but they are just locked in a digital creche, being fed a constant stream of slop by some billionaire in California. Absolutely tragic.
Writing things down on paper actually forces you to think before you open your mouth. On a screen, you just type any old rubbish, delete it, edit it, and paste it until it sounds like a machine wrote it. With a pen, you have to mean it. If you mess up, it stays there. It has got grit. It has got character.
We have traded our entire attention spans for convenience, and it is a massive con. You walk down the street now and everyone is walking like a zombie, staring down at their palms, completely oblivious to the world around them. They are missing the whole point of being alive because they are too busy logging it on an app.
I want to see the world with my own two eyes, not through a glass window. I want to look at a tree without wondering how it would look with a filter on it.
The daft cabbages everywhere I look can keep their digital cages and their virtual reality. I am going back to basics.