Escaping the digital world

It starts innocently enough. You wake up, bleary-eyed, and reach for your phone, telling yourself you’re just going to check the weather. But before you know it, you’ve been sucked into a black hole of headlines, funny reels, and someone’s daily rant on Facebook. You haven’t even had coffee yet, and you’re already emotionally invested in an argument about whether pineapple belongs on pizza.

Information overload is no longer just a phrase; it’s our daily reality. We have more access to data, opinions, and real-time updates than any generation before us. News alerts flash across our screens faster than we can process them, political debates rage, and our social media feeds refresh endlessly, promising us we can become millionaires or have youthful skin “with this one simple hack.”

Meanwhile, outside our digital bubbles, actual life is happening. The sky is doing its sky things – changing colours, shifting clouds, occasionally throwing in a rainbow for special effects. Our children are growing, our pets are giving us judgmental looks for ignoring them, and our friends are sharing stories we only half-hear because we’re too busy crafting the perfect post about how we need to be more present.

I recently had a wake-up call about this. While scrolling my phone at a family event, nodding absentmindedly at my loved ones, one of my kids said, “Mom, can you please put your phone down for a minute?” The truth is, I wasn’t even reading anything particularly important – probably watching another easy way to make chocolate cake. Was it more important than being present with my family? No. Did I somehow feel it was? Apparently.

We justify our constant scrolling by telling ourselves we need to be informed. And yes, staying informed is good. But at what point does information become a burden rather than a benefit. At what point does keeping up with everything mean missing out on the very real, tangible moments happening right in front of us?

I remember a time before smartphones. If someone wanted to reach me, they called my house and hoped I was home. If I wanted to know what was going on in the world, I waited for the evening news or read the paper. And guess what? I survived. I didn’t get hourly updates on what some politician was up to, and I still managed to survive without constant doom scrolling.

So, how do we reclaim our attention spans? How do we put down the devices long enough to notice the magic happening around us?

For starters, we can be more intentional. Set specific times to check the news or social media, rather than letting it dictate our entire day. We can also embrace the power of silence – no notifications, no buzzing, no screens. It might feel weird at first, like we’re missing out on something critical, but over time, we’ll remember how nice it is to simply exist without being bombarded by updates.

Living in the real world. Can you imagine it?

And then there’s the radical idea of replacing screen time with actual experiences. Read a book. Go for a walk and actually look at things instead of photographing them for Instagram. Have a conversation or go out for lunch with a friend, without one eye on your phone. Watch a sunset without needing to prove you saw it by posting a picture captioned “No filter.” Watch one of your kid’s school performances live, instead of watching the video later.

At the end of our lives, no one will say, “Wow, they really kept up with the news.” They’ll remember the time we spent with them, the laughter, the moments we were fully present. Life is happening in real-time, right now, all around us.

We just have to look up long enough to see it.