Screen Junkie - A Diary Entry

Behold my diary entry for the evening:

Myeh. Trying and failing to conjure up a topic for a blog post, but annoyingly drawing a blank. Been spinning about in the snow with A all day, after he decided to show me where he'd seen the heaviest snowfall on his travels for work. I fricking love snow. Especially when it sits in trees, looking all picturesque-like.

Ended up seeing what felt like half of Wales because the shortcuts through the mountains were still blocked off. We were in the car for hours, but I did learn one exciting thing from the experience - I am surprisingly local to Tonypandy... All this time living where I live, and I could've popped over to have a drink with Fireman Sam!! Legend.

The spin was a much needed one. I got home and felt all relaxed from not having used my brain very much at all for hours. I was a mindless passenger, oohing and ahhing at the pretty, white trees. And then it dawned on me. I hadn't looked at a single screen for about 3 hours. Not even my mobile phone's!

I spend most of my waking hours with my eyes fixed to a screen, and in the long run, that's a lot of hours! I work at a computer for at least 8hours a day. When I'm on my lunch break, I'm furiously texting on my phone, and any free time I get at home is generally spent on the iPad, phone, standalone PC (retro chic, I know!), or in front of the TV. And, last night, I suggested that we go to the cinema... To go look at the biggest screen I can think of. Y'know, for a change!

Technology seems to be reaching a point where it all pretty much does the same stuff. Everything is "smart." Smart phones, smart TV... And my lovely iPad is definitely smart. Clever little thing, I love it so...

It's quite overwhelming, I think, that we're spending all of our leisure time moving from screen to different-sized screen for hours on end every day. And then we sleep. And then we wake up and start all over again. I'm one of those hopeless addicts who go to bed, intending to sleep but then waste up to 30mins checking Twitter on my phone before I feel up to date enough to nod off. It's a worrying, but common (or so I'm told... By people on Tumblr and Twitter. Perhaps not a reliable source) habit.

I find that after a few hours spent on the iPad, I feel like I've had fun, but there's always this residual, low-level stress that follows - some anxiety that the time I've killed playing Hanging With Friends and scrolling through miles of Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook feeds wasn't time well spent. But what else can I do? I can't leave the house, because, as all fellow poor people know, the outside world is an expensive place. And there's nothing else to do at home bar attend to the cleaning the boy and I have neglected for weeks in favour of the iPad and Xbox. The world outside of the Internet is just plain bleak!

Maybe the next time I've got an afternoon slash day to myself, I'll put aside some time to living a screen-free existence, like a peaceful, enlightened modern day hippy. See if it makes me feel different at all. I'm just going to nip onto the iPad for a sec. This has the potential to be a blog post...