Absent-Minded: Modern Slavery

How did I come to choose this particular topic to write about? Very banally… on someone’s Spotify playlist, I’ve seen a song with the name Absent Mind, it was a split of second and my brain had constructed a topic for my Monday article. However, a month flew away before I finished it, but I still think it is an important topic to be addressed. So now we have the introduction out of the way we can focus on those absent minds of ours, which most of us are guilty of having.

It is not to say that there’s something wrong with you if you have ever experienced an absent mind but it is a great pity to walk around the world not noticing life. It often happens we do something and after it is done we don’t really remember the process. Do you know the feeling when you read a page of a book just to realise you don’t remember a single word of what you have read? I know it very well, happens to me all the time. I sometimes get so invested in thoughts that really rather bother me that I miss entire chunks of time. This is obviously not that big of a problem when you are reading but what happens when you drive a car? - Not happy stuff. Also, the problem is that all our future generations are prone to be absent-minded, missing on all of the fruitfulness of life, leaving them in despair and in the need of a therapist.

Even if our brains are prone to routinize, which is a so-called efficacy tool, sometimes too much of a routine gets you in trouble. We like to routinely scroll on our phones sometimes for hours at a time.

Not to mention you are losing precious time when being mindful can add up to your experience and create beautiful memories. I’m sure you know that instance when you arrive at a beautiful natural destination and it's crowded with phones instead of people. Surely, many do not even notice that they are away from their homes because they are engrossed in whatever their phones can give them, the other half is obsessing about the best picture taken so they can share it with their followers and make them somewhat jealous, adding to the circle of absent-mindedness where all we see is blue light emanating from the screens. Where I live there are many a beautiful place you can visit be it just a forest for mushroom-picking. Sadly I also found myself seeing them through the screen of my smartphone.

Is there an overuse of our devices? Do they help us or do they make us slaves? Slavery was abolished as a cruel act on humanity. However, was it really? Or we have just invented better, more clever, and not-so-obvious ways how to ensure people get manipulated and used. I think the latter. It is obviously impossible to stop evolution and there will be always a strong forward current but as humans, we also need an opposing current that will hold us to our nature and ground us in our presence. The fastness of the modern world becomes so engrossing that we forget the human need for closeness, love, and just day-to-day interaction with people without avarice and vile. However, the time that is spent in front of our devices robs us of all, not only the actual physical contact but also of our abilities to be genuinely nice to others and what's most important to

ourselves. As a result, we pour more oil into a fire and unknowingly make a way for an inhuman future.

As individuals, we need to take more specific care of ourselves. And by specific, I do not mean personally tailored wellness app on our smart devices. We need to disconnect for a while at times. Go out into nature in person not by switching on David Attenborough’s documentary on Netflix. Enjoy the sun, and see diverse fauna and flora, before it’s gone. It may sound like pure woo-woo

or crazy spiritual practice but the sad fact is we all have a spirit and that spirit is currently being exploited. Daily. This sounds to me like slavery. We cannot see it because it is neatly packed in the shining colours of our apps and in the brain’s dopamine-reward system, but it is there. The sooner we learn to introduce balance into our lives the better. All this is not about ditching your phone altogether deeming it the devil’s device. We need it, there is no doubt about that. I personally like many features of it but many a time I have found myself scrolling mindlessly watching video after video with no added value, for hours, and after that, I felt completely drained. You might not feel it straight away but it eats you alive. You are selling your soul for cognitive decline. To me, it doesn’t sound right from any viewpoint.

At the end of the day, we’ll die on our own without our smartphones. There will be no cloud data to take to our graves (I hope). And what will be left of us? Virtual index of our life we haven’t been actually living. So let’s check in with our loved ones (yes use the smartphone, if you cannot do otherwise. Call them.), and with ourselves. Do we rush somewhere where the destination is unclear only for the sake of moving forward? What example are you showing the young ones? The one where you absent-mindedly shoo them away just to watch someone else’s suffering on the TV news? What does it teach them? I think it teaches them that the device providing shocking information is more important than human being.

Love, Sandra