Thursday, January 14, 2016

Day 14- Every Day Inspirations - Time for Digital Detox



Fasting used to help us get a physical detox once in a while.  It used to provide a balanced metabolism and build in right immune system.     

But today, we are so much overloaded with technology and gleaming gadgets.   No one walks around without a mobile in hand or pocket and without heads phones hanging over.  People keep talking in air as they walk, run, jog, sit, eat, and sleep.  They are talking into the phone…ignoring who is around you.  

I love technology and I make a living working for one of the largest technology company.   I am not an exception to this addiction.  Sometimes, instead of the gadgets serving or helping me, they have become my energy consuming devices taking away my precious time and thoughts.   Creative forwards are killing my own creativity and thinking.  I am enjoying the repeated memes and endless shares.  

This unending connectivity gives me no time to connect within, with my hobbies, with my friends over a coffee table, with a paper-book in hand.   It is challenge…I feel totally lost without internet, without my phone beeping on messages and if I don’t get calls for half day, I start feeling desperate that the world has forgotten me.  

Thanks to the recent floods in Chennai, that thrashed this syndrome of virtual connectivity restlessness…no messengers worked, Skype was at sky distance, mails flooded the mailbox and not our heads, and Facebook and Twitter didn’t flood me for 5 days.  

I don’t dare to take the pledge of continuing this disconnect from the world, but I realized that it is time to start keeping things in control.  Start with few hours of digital detox every day.   Probably, I would talk to my neighbor aunty over the compound wall, than wishing her happy birthday on the Facebook Wall…

Mails can wait, unless someone’s roof is on fire.   Stop my followers and likes on pictures on the net.   I will give myself a chance to reconnect within. 

Not typing ‘Om’ hundred times on internet page, but to sit devotional in the puja room and fold my hands and say my prayer loudly.   Instead of sharing pictures of sweets and cakes, probably I will carry a cake at 12 in the night on a friend’s birthday.

Instead of repeated promises to get fit, I now need to tie my shoes and take the first few steps in the nearby park.    Yes, I have to start living.  Not just in the virtual world.   I need a digital detox for sure.  And if not now, When?   If not I, who?