Seventy hours per week — that’s the amount of time I averaged last semester on my laptop, which boils down to about 10 hours per day of screen time. This doesn’t even include the countless hours I likely spent watching TV and checking my phone before crashing on the couch after a long and exhausting day of online school and accepting a sad and simple fact: I was paying $25,000 a year to sit in my room and glance through second-story windows at the same dead trees in my parking lot every day while my attention inevitably wanders from the digital devices that had become my own personal purgatory. Classes once separated by long walks across campus and breaths of fresh open air were now interrupted by short power naps and a brief respite from the headaches that pounded in my skull each time a mechanical voice from dying laptop speakers pressed against my eardrum.
This semester, the professor of my three-credit art course, which meets six hours weekly, explained on the first day of class that he expected students to spend an additional twelve hours weekly on homework — 18 hours per week in total. He’s a perfectly nice fellow and a wonderful professor; the work was just the reality of art classes. Our first project was supposed to take inspiration from The Garden of Forking Paths, and while the metaphor came easily, the only infinitely diverging and converging network I could envision was not a towering outdoor maze or vibrant garden with chirping birds and bustling bees but instead a digital web of code and programming on a brightly lit screen.
I try to go for walks occasionally to feel the fresh spring air rush a serene coolness through me, but the world outside greets me instead with the cold bitterness of a neglected friend who resents my abandonment. I try to soak in the sunlight’s energy as I walk to the store, but my limbs drag across the pavement with every step because, for some reason, sitting around doing nothing all day is the most draining effort a person can make. I try to write about the nature I see, to document its fascinating features and awestruck wonder, but even the twisted forest of dead trees and tangled vines in the parking lot outside my home remains a stagnant picture on a glass screen that shines through second-story bedroom windows. I wonder if things will ever feel like home again.