Yesterday I took a picture of the sunset with my cell phone. I couldn’t do it any other way. Because the moment my car reached the highest point on the road, the sun went out. An irresistible sight. A mountain panorama of the southern Black Forest spreads before me – and the big orange-red ball of light over neighboring Switzerland. When I looked at the picture after that, I had to laugh out loud.
Because a few days ago I turned my smartphone screen to black and white. This is one of the procedures I prescribed to myself at the beginning of the year. In addition to 4 weeks of abstaining from social media. Posting pictures, lectures, and texts has been part of my daily routine for years, and it’s part of my job. So it’s even harder for me to keep my free time free from that.
“Social media apps are deleted from my phone,
So, I don’t automatically look at the screen very often.
More boredom in my life
But it also means more sluggishness.”
This also includes the new combination of creativity and relaxation in the digital age: you can’t simply close your workplace and go home. Because we take it everywhere with us: in our trouser pockets. Problem: As a result, the alert status is always just a text, call, and email. After all, who can stand by and not check when this thing beeps, vibrates, or flashes a red number?
But there is also the positive opposite. With a smartphone, the next welcome distraction is just a touch away. An interesting piece of information that might otherwise be missed, recent controversies in the English royal family, for example. Every time new information is found, every connection is made, every flash gives the brain a small dose of the stimulating hormone dopamine.
important health approach
The important thing is the habit that you create on a nervous level. Find the next distraction. Although we are exhausted and tired, we are looking for new information that is already causing us distress. The inner noise that we voluntarily bring into our lives. Above all, it often sounds like a cultural pessimism: digitization has enormous advantages. And it will continue to shape our lives anyway. But most importantly, learn how to use it in a healthy way. I believe digital chastity is the fast of the future. We must integrate it and actually teach it to our children. or the other way. In fact, I learned the trick with shades of gray from my daughter, who uses less dopamine in her brain in this way (because we are more drawn to color and moving images than to gray ones).
It’s not really fun. Read the news in black and white. And the social media apps are deleted from my phone, so I automatically scan the screen at a lower rate. I feel a little more bored in my life, but also a little more slow. I realize these days are good for me. This year also I will not take my mobile phone with me on vacation. Real sunsets only exist in reality. Just like the real smells, touches and encounters. Suddenly the world seems hotter to me.
The print edition of Tagespost complements the current news on die-tagespost.de with background information and analysis.
