By Moyosore Awotile
This is not a post about mobile phones or social media apps, this is a post about nothing.
It is very easy to get lost in the fast-paced rhythm of this new age. Everybody wants something from us, and because we are so easily accessible, it is almost impossible to not attend their requests.
The average person goes to bed and wakes up to notifications from at least 3 apps on their phone, be it their mail box(es), Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, iMessage, and some other apps I wouldn’t add because the list will be endless. Who does not wake up and reach first for their phone, before even praying? And when it is time to pray, why look under your bed for a dusty hard copy of your bible when you have it – guess where – right there on your phone?!
In 2015, The Huffington Post published an article stating that the average young adult spends roughly a third of their day engrossed in their mobile phones. Digressing a bit, it is expected that everyone should get at least 6 hours of sleep daily (we are up for 18 hours, one-third of which is 6 hours).
This means we spend 6 hours on our phones, daily!
To be quite fair, a lot of what we do on our phones also includes work activities, such as responding to emails, researching “business” related topics and the activities of rival companies, searching coordinates 52.376552, 5.198303 on Google Maps (do NOT search for this at home), responding to texts from clients and colleagues, etc.
For the employed, typical office hours range from 9hours to 12 hours, during which we are bombarded with various tasks from different sources, all of which are urgent/ top priority. To relax and take the edge off, we what? We pick up our phones again and go through our social media apps – if they are not already installed on our computer systems, especially during the 45 minutes to 3 hours spent commuting to and from the office and home daily.
But this is not a post about mobile phones or social media apps, this is a post about nothing. Yes, nothing.
We absorb so much information every day, very rarely do we take our time to appreciate the magic of precious moments. How well do we really understand all that is going on around us? We close deals, close after each office day, close open apps clogging our RAMs, and demand closure from exes (always a bad idea), but do we really close our minds? PS: this is not the same as being close minded.
The plethora of information accumulated and not properly processed does us more harm than good, and this is how people get burnt out.
If you are wondering why younger people are becoming increasingly prone to high blood pressure, you have found the reason – minus the bad diet.
So here’s what you will be doing today – nothing. This can be practiced as a daily coping mechanism for stress and upon re-emergence into the world, one is able to see the world anew and quite correctly make a toast to new beginnings.
So, folks, today, you are advised to: Shut down your senses, relax and focus on NOTHING!
