I’m sitting on my parents’ old couch at a family celebration. It’s a very funny, relaxed atmosphere when my mother gets up and announces promisingly that she’s going to get something. Even my father doesn’t know what she’s planning and we speculate what she’s coming back with. And then she comes with slow steps, hiding something behind her back to maximize the excitement. But then she reveals: a photo album of me and my siblings when we were younger.
Memories of my eleven-year-old self
So we leaf through this book for quite a while, laughing and thinking back to the old days. I was touched by many of the pages, but there was one picture in particular that surprisingly made me think even longer. It shows my eleven-year-old self, freshly turned that day, holding up one of his presents, beaming with joy. The smile is all over my face and even when I think back to that moment, I remember how happy I was: My first cell phone!!!
It symbolized to me how big and old I had become. I was even more excited about the endless possibilities that were now available to me. To be honest, it was an old cell phone with buttons and no internet for me, so compared to today it had barely expanded my scope of action, but I was extremely happy.
The joy that practically jumps out of this picture is what makes me think about it for so long. This cell phone was my very first digital device and it meant an incredible amount to me and triggered a deep sense of joy. When I compare that with my feelings today, a lot has changed…
My reality today
Today, I feel increasingly stressed by the same device. I can’t remember a situation in which I was so deeply happy to pick up my cell phone.
It’s a paradox because the functions and possibilities available to me today have exploded since the joy in this picture. I use them several times a day in different ways and I’m glad to have them because they have made many areas of my life easier. For example, I don’t know how I would have found my way around a completely new city in a new country without organizing my train tickets, my routes and my apartment digitally. Or even the possibility of keeping in touch with my friends back home during my Erasmus stay.
Nevertheless, I no longer pick up my cell phone and smile all over my face. Quite the opposite. This summer I went on vacation to a farm. There, for the first time in my life, I made a conscious decision not to enter the digital sphere once during my entire vacation. My own digital detox.
Digital Detox
The idea of digital detox slowly became popular at the end of the 2010s, but by now everyone has probably heard of it. It describes:
“a period of time during which you do not use mobile phones, computers, etc., because you usually use these devices too much” (Cambridge Dictionary)
There are now special vacation offers that call themselves detox-vacations or offline-vacations and advertise the fact that they have no internet connection. My vacation wasn’t like that, but I simply came up with the idea of shutting out my digital devices for this time. The result: I was more relaxed than I had been for a long time and really happy.
Of course, other aspects also played a role (great weather, vacation, …), but as I sat there on my parents’ couch a couple weeks after the vacation and looked at my eleven-year-old self, who was incredibly happy about his first digital device, the change was reflected:
For me, entering digital life used to stand for all the possibilities that are now available to me and triggered great joy. Today, digital life constantly shows me all the unfinished tasks, unanswered messages and missed activities and causes me stress.
Have your view of digital life also changed? Perhaps in the same way?
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