The Divide: Using Your Tech vs. Stepping Away

Three weeks. That’s how long isolation has been, at least for me. The boredom sweeping over me is staggering, yet there’s barely anything I can do. While video games are a nice outlet, you can only play them for so long before you just get bored of them. The same can be said about movies, and even Youtube. So what then? There’s not all that much people in quarantine can do… right?

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While my games and other technology are my go-to for situations like this, when I’m forced to stay inside for days on end, they tend to lose their appeal rather fast. It’s not that what I’m doing isn’t fun for me: I always love playing games and relaxing. However, there’s always this case of there being too much of a good thing. I could play games for hours on end, but by the end of it, I might have a headache or might be worrying my family with my hermit lifestyle (or was that before the quarantine? I forget…). So what then? What could I do beside playing my games?

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There actually is something that I found that I can do. Or, rather, not do, depending on how you look at it. I happened to pick this up from my therapist (almost all of us have been to one, I don’t think it’s taboo to talk about it), and it’s both interesting while also challenging. To do this, you really don’t need anything at all, aside from a comfortable chair. Even while I lack that, I can still do this activity. And what is this activity? Nothing… No, seriously, it’s doing nothing. Or, more correctly, it’s a form of meditation, where one tries to completely think of nothing at all, simply sitting and breathing.

Now, in today’s day and age, it’s nearly impossible to do something like this, I know. There’s always way too much to think about! And with our screens going at a near constant rate at this point, some would say that it can’t be done! However, there’s plenty of material out there, including the book Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomborodi, that says doing stuff like this is actually beneficial to you! By stepping away from our technology, we can find ourselves able to bolster our creativity even more, and not become so dependent on this stuff. But then, the question remains: Does this actually work?

From what I’ve done and experienced… not so much. During my own meditation, I haven’t really felt that urge or itch to create different things. I simply sit down with my eyes closed for five minutes at a time, trying to block out everything else until I can’t think of anything. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to do, but it can be done (not that I’ve mastered this, of course). At the end of it, I don’t have a rush of ideas coming to me, nor do I feel very inspired to do much of anything else. Now, granted, there’s some problems with my logic: I only went for five minutes. Some might argue that this isn’t ample enough time away from screens to help boost creativity. While true, I still feel that this might not be the correct course of action when it comes to building up creativity. However, I will say that even five minutes of doing nothing actually feels pretty decent! My mind isn’t going off the rails with all the influx of information or all the movement on my screens. My eyes aren’t wasting away and getting even worse for at least a few minutes. It’s actually not so bad! So then… where does this take us?

With the current outbreak on our hands, we find ourselves dependent on our tech at nearly all hours of the day. There’s not much else we can do but cling to it. Some of us have to cling for it! Without our screens in our faces, we might lose our jobs or fail our classes. However, at the same time, being in front of our screens all the time could be harmful in some ways, since we’re staring at them for so long. Because of this, I feel that a happy medium should be created. What I mean is that there should be a divide between using our technology and stepping away from it (look, the title!). We can’t step away from it forever, that much is true. With how much technology is growing by the day, it’s become essential to our lives to the point that we can’t live without it! However, taking time for yourself and pushing it away is definitely a good thing to do. Even in small intervals like five minutes of doing nothing, you tend to feel a little bit more refreshed and relaxed, rather than tensed and stressed like one might get with video games or TV. If you can find that balance and work with it, mold it into something you feel comfortable doing, I feel that you’ll be able to get a lot more out of your time during this quarantine.

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