Growing up, it wasn’t a strange scenario to have folks much, much older than us giving away
their wisdom for free; they’d seize every opening they’d get. And one of the most common note
we’d get from them went a little like this, “You’re going to wreck your eyes with that amount of
screentime.” And it had its own family, all along the lines of ruined eyesight, bad headaches,
delayed homework, and horrible grade sheets. Looking back at those times now, it’s not so hard
to see at least a little bit of truth in those concerns, but it is a bit startling to realize that there’s
so much more to the burn-out that screen time can do to a brain
Defective Attention Span
You’ve felt this at least once past your twenties; the blur that takes
over your mind even with the loud audiovisuals playing nonstop in front of you on your screen.
And you have definitely heard your friends complain about losing interest in things too soon.
They want to get back to reading but every time they pick up a highly recommended read they
can’t seem to see it through. They leave projects and creative hobbies and ideas behind as half-
baked empty shells of once-upon-a-times. And even with a screen around, playing reels and
music and series constantly, the brain feels fizzled out like it’s in sleep mode.
Crumbling Focus
Multitasking comes easy to a lot of us. But laser focusing on screens for years
seem to have left a mark when it comes to juggling our focus on different things. Now we don’t
watch a movie or listen to an audiobook or shop for sales online, we juggle all of those things at
the same time and get nothing out of it in the end. When the screen turns black and devices get
plugged in to charge and it’s time to go to bed, the mind’s left reeling trying to make sense of
everything it attempted to do. And the product of that time spent almost always ends up at the
crossroad of frustrations: the movie was barely paid attention to, the audiobook just felt like a
mishmash of words after a while, and shopping online didn’t even count because all that was
done was hazily scrolling pages after pages to keep the mind from getting bored.
Losing Sight of Memories
Processing things now has become somewhat of a chore when it
comes to the loud screaming content and noise being pulled from our screens. And even more
so, retaining that content we are consuming has become a challenge to so many of us who used
to wolf down stories and time-consuming content not that long ago. Now, even when we get
hold of some good series, we rave about it to friends the next day, and then we forget the heart
of it in a week. This steep decay of short-term memory feels jolting and frustrating, but more
than anything, it makes the perception of time feel like it’s flying past us without leaving behind
a good story to laugh about.
Screentime has its faults. But it’s also what fuels the time the world operates in. Every space
taken up by everyday life has a screen playing in the background; but even so, taking a break to
watch the living world slowly pass us by, can help some.t