Digital Epidemic
Hello, fellow reader. I want to warn you that this topic is controversial and sadly all the people who talk about it are usually pro-productivity cult freaks. Because of them, a lot of sane people never really think about these problems. I don’t know if I can call myself sane (at least I hope I am), but here are my thoughts with no appeal to wellbeing or productivity.
Imagine
First, I am going to elaborate a little about the ‘Epidemic’ part. Imagine a new desease got discovered, lets say Covid-2077. There are no symptoms: no fever, no sneezing, no pain anywhere. Except one: you start to sleep 7 hours more. So, if you sleep 7 hours a day, it adds up to 14 hours of sleep. You got ~40% less time with activity. Most of you probably should sleep more, so it is even worse.
40% less time with activity means 40% less time to live. But it gets worse. We have to do our jobs. Optimistic case is that the work takes 4 hours a day for you, and after doing the math Covid-2077 takes 50% of your free time. But for some people… I used to work at big tech company… You have to drive 1 hour to the workplace, then 8 hours workday, then 1 hour back. I don’t even count lunch time that may be an additional hour (and not included in the workday). For such people this desease will take ALL their free time. Really, just see:
- 7 hours: base sleep
- +7 hours: increased sleep due to the imaginary desease = 14 hours
- +2 hours: commuting = 16 hours
- +8 hours: work = 24 hours
So this thing may eat somewhere from 50% to 100% of your free time. Its that time where you truly living your life. And maybe it doesn’t seem very dramatic when you think about it in terms of 24-hours, but you can convert that in the years of living. If you remove 7 hours a day for sleep and 4 hours for work, you got average amount of conscious living somewhere around 40-50 years. Again, you might remove more if you sleep or work more. This desease is going to decrease this conscious lifetime from 40-50 years to 0-30 years. I wouldn’t want to get one!
It’s happening now!
Average screen time in the world is 7 hours a day. That’s average, guys… Not some max time. Huge part of that time is dead time: it doesn’t build memories, skills, relationships, or meaningful experiences. Just TikToks and stuff… That is why I made that analogy with sleep (but sleep is actually useful).
Of course a lot of you will work and that’s also screen time. But average screen time for IT people is around 10-13 hours, so the claim still holds. We can argue about my methods of calculation and whether this is the actual average or not, but I think you agree that a certain group of people drastically reduced their free time. And this group of people is not small.
I believe that we have this epidemic right now. Almost everyone in my bubble is a subject to this global change (though I agree it’s just my bubble). I also must mention that the joy that devices give us demotivates doing real stuff. But it’s already getting into the area of productivity bullshit, so I am not going to go deeper with this.
There is no way you can rollback
And you don’t need. Using digital infrastructure became very important nowadays. And a lot of will argue that digital stuff make information accessible, learning more easy and connects people all over the world. I agree. For that reason I can’t stop using YouTube. It has a lot of learning stuff (at least for me). I really love using technologies and I think I am so lucky to be born at that time.
Just to be clear: I don’t label all screen time as dead time. And you should not. My screen time used to be 12 hours a day and that included work & study. Nowaways the average is 6 hours: just 2 times less, you might say. But my dead time stripped from 8 hours a day to 2 hours (which is 4 times less) and this change didn’t affect useful scenarios of devices usage.
So, what do I do?
I am not going to say you that, because I don’t know what is going to work for you. But the goal of this article is to make it clear: devices and information = drugs. For me it is not a metaphor. I really do believe that we are having an epidemic where everyone started using drugs and doesn’t understand it just yet. Much like with cocaine (remember, Coca-Cola?) and other things when they just got discovered.
It doesn’t mean that information is bad just like drugs are not. There are medicine drugs after all. You need to understand all the consequences and select the best strategy that works for you. I am fighting with my addiction to the Internet for about 5 years. And I still can’t say that I got over it (I see a good progress though).
A rule of thumb that I use for myself is whether current usage contributes to my future or not. Convesrations with interesting people contribute to my future, but 2 hours a day vs 6 hours a day will not make a big difference in my opinion, so I can limit conversations to 2 hours. YouTube Shorts about CS Go when I stopped playing CS Go 6 years ago will not help me. And I will forget every such YouTube short in a moment after I watched it.
On the other hand, you may want to chill for some time and that’s not bad as well. Just keep the price of such joy in your head. I would rather go to movie with my time which will both contribute to my future and make me enjoy the movie rather than watch 6 hours of YouTube Shorts with AI telling me plot of all movies on Earth.
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and discuss!