Addicted
It’s no news. These days, lot of us are addicted to our devices. It’s only been 12 years since the first iPhone came out, and our lives are completely changed. I was an early adapter to smart phones and had no clue how it was going to affect the way I live. It didn’t happen over night, but slowly. For the first year, I didn’t have any more apps than the ones that came with the iPhone thinking, “neh, I don’t need more apps.” Now I probably have more than 100 apps, and probably use half of it on a regular basis. And my iPhone does EVERYTHING from waking me up in the morning, timing for my meditation, keeping track of my time and money, banking, taking me to places, listening to great talks, attending meetings, and the list goes on, right? We can learn about everything and ANYTHING at our fingertips today. That’s crazy.
Of course, as a photographer, I sincerely feel like my favorite camera currently is my iPhone, which also has all the fun apps to edit and “work” the images like the ones I use for this post every week. I don’t have to transfer the files to the computer to work. It’s all done in my palm.
And my gosh, I can’t help but notice my tendency to randomly pick up my iPhone in the middle of doing something else. Sometimes even during my meditation because I often use the Insight Timer app, I find myself picking it up to see how much time is left. I’m mostly aware that I’m doing it, but mostly not able to stop. So that’s considered an addiction, isn’t it?
I’ve heard people talk about how they’ve set some limits with their use of these incredible devices. A young gentleman who came to my sitting group said he went back to a flip phone and hasn’t looked back. Short of doing that, I know about some of the things we can do like leaving the devices outside of the bedroom when we go to bed, or not turning it off for the first and last couple of hours of our days. May be I haven’t tried hard enough, but the best I can do these days is to be mindful enough to choose to listen to a Dharma talk as opposed to watching a news as I get in bed. That’s my honest truth. So there…
#YouCanSitWithUs