Oh My Handphone

I am a self-professed hand phone addict. I can spend hours looking at my hand phone and it is a huge problem simply because:

1. I have an active 16 month old child. You know the golden rule? Silence is not good when you have a toddler?
2. I work from home. More hand phone time equals to less work. Darn!
3. The house doesn't clean on its own.

I used to be the person who checks her handphone the moment I am up. Nowadays I don’t look at it (except to check what time is it) until about 10 am (I am up at 7am) and I think that it is a great achievement. But my happiness is short lived because then I am hooked on it from then on till well late at night.

The moment I sit in the car, I will check my hand phone for updates in the following order; WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. I take pride in being updated with the latest news (more like gossips especially in WhatsApp) and happenings. Then I realised that car rides have become rather silent (only punctuated by cries from the baby seat hater a.k.a Pebbles) and I was not stopping to smell the roses.

The Cricket World Cup is going on and Hubby is literally glued to the television from 8pm-2am every day. One day I told him ‘I wish I was the TV so you can look at me all the time’ rather scornfully and to which he cleverly replied, 'Well I wish I was your hand phone so you can LOOK at me all the time!’ I was taken aback at the remark. In actual truth, taken aback does not really justify how I felt, the Malay word ‘Tersentap’ sounds more like it.

So before I slept that night, I was mulling over what he said and shamefully, I realised that he was right. My hand phone has literally become an extended limb of mine. I am CONSTANTLY looking at it and it has drastically reduced my ‘connectednes’ with my surroundings. I know I have written about hyperconnectedness some time ago, of which you can read here but sadly I did not practice what I preached.

So I have taken some baby steps to solve this issue. Like I mentioned, I don’t look at my hand phone for messages the moment I am up. I don’t look at it when I am in the car with my husband and Pebbles. I don’t look at it while watching a movie on TV and I don’t look at it while Pebbles play, instead I play with her (She is so great at make believe games)

People say that all these apps are supposed to bring people closer but in actual truth, it is driving us apart. So I am taking a pledge to reduce hand phone time and increase substantial quality time with people who matter. Who is in it with me?

Image from Google