RECENTLY, I got an ‘opportunity’ to live without a smartphone for over two weeks. To my surprise, life became something I had never imagined, and I had some very interesting realisations every day of those couple of weeks. In the beginning, it was hard to live without a smartphone as I, like others, was addicted to it. Sudden urges to usr it arose from time to time. Fortunately, I had no option but to divert my mind, and I kept reading books to keep myself engaged.

This refreshing experience made me realise that life is beautiful without such gadgets — although their importance in modern times cannot be denied. I learnt that smartphone addicts live in a virtual world, far away from the real world.

The experience taught me that gadgets shorten the individuals’ focus span. We act and live our lives incompletely, as if our minds have been under a virus attack, and, as a result, we tend to malfunction even when we assume that we are actually hyper-functional.

We crave for reels, posts and tweets, and then for likes, views, comments and reposts. In doing so, we become procras-tinators while dealing with essential matters of life. The ‘content’ we consume through the gadgets, like music, movies, video games, and even sectarian debates among clerics, keeps our minds preocc-upied even while we are asleep.

Social media has seriously hampered people-to-people interaction, and this is one of the main reasons we are becoming more of an introvert.

There are parks, playgrounds as well as libraries out there in the physical world. All we have to do is to redefine our sense of entertainment and learning.

Abdul Rasheed Jamarani
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, November 15th, 2024