Reclaiming my time

It seems that we Americans (folks in the US) spend a significant amount of time staring at screens.  From this January 2018 article from Technology Review, that we see that we are spending nearly 24 hours a week on the Internet, 17.6 of those hours at home. That's a whole day we are losing to the various screens in our lives.

This August MarketWatch article provides numbers that are more dire - 11 hours a day looking at some sort of screen. I'm a simple English teach, but even I can do that math - three days a week are lost to screens.

I've been guilty, I can't lie. Just this past Saturday, I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. I also removed Twitter from my phone. I have to be careful, because the lie that my depression has always told me was that if I disappeared into thin air, no one would even notice. I didn't announce my decision, just did it. People are too busy staring at their screens for 11 hours a day to even notice that one person has "disappeared," so the numbers are helping to reduce my anxiety a bit.

Since Saturday, I've been to the gym twice (something my very overweight body needs) and have read many pages in two books that I'm trying to tackle. Plus, I'm putting a hit on a couple of cleaning projects at home. The need to "connect" plus my depression made social media a serious negative in my life. I would post and go back endlessly to see if anyone care enough to comment or like. I'm sure that other people manage better than me. As Emerson said, "Know thyself." I do and I've decided to turn off the screens as often as possible.

I put connect in quotation marks because I'm not really sure that real connection happens over social media. That isn't to say that I haven't made real life friends I met online through common interests. I have. I just think that only online connections are not as strong as if you interact on a regular basis in real life. That's the part I'm missing.

Perhaps I got lazy and presumed that any contact was good enough. It's not and I've missed out on too many hours scrolling through my phone. Time to live in real time, with real live humans in front of me.