“We crowded the world into our small lives. And the crowding claimed its victims.” Michael Harris

Have you ever relished the thought of bashing your smartphone to bits until it’s just a shattered and mangled mess of colourful components splayed out like a Jackson Pollock abstract? 

It is a violent and costly act, you admit, but how else will you sever your co-dependent relationship with this toxic time drain? 

You are in a state of what author Michael Harris calls ‘continuous partial attention’ and it will take a colossal effort to change that. 

You remember, with fondness, the days when you had an attention span. Now, you can’t get through three paragraphs in a novel without your mind wandering off like a reckless lamb searching for a tastier patch of grass. You are bewildered and confused by these constant cravings for newness. You don’t understand how an intelligent person such as yourself can be lured by click-baity headlines and status updates into the land of shallow-as-fuck or shit-that’s-terrifying every day of your waking life. 

Precious hours are stolen from you and yet you scroll away your days oblivious to the panting dog at your feet that has to take a piss so bad her eyes are crossed. 

This week you’ve averaged four hours a day on your device. Meanwhile, you haven’t felt the wind on your face for at least 72 hours. Maybe a hammer isn’t enough for this job. Maybe it’s time for a solar flare to take care of things.

You don’t really want it to come to that. Sure, you’ve always enjoyed the first half hour of an evening power outage (just look at how flawless your skin looks bathed in candlelight – and kids – let’s play Yatzee!) But the romance of the moment is killed when you head to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and the kettle won’t work. When you flip on the light switch to try and figure out why the piece of crap won’t turn on, you are met with darkness and ringing in your ears. Thank God the beer is still cold. How long will this bloody outage last? You ask your other half, who is using his last 5 percent of battery power to beat his high score on an online crossword puzzle. As the sweat stains under your armpits grow to the size of grapefruits (it’s now 85 in the house), you reach for your dead iPhone and cry.

This might be us one of these days. Just the other day I read a terrifying article (thanks Facebook!) that in 2012, we just missed a solar storm that could have obliterated our power grid. The only thing that saved us from the apocalypse was the fact that the sun was turned away from the Earth at the time. If the earth had been facing the sun, as it had been just a week or 10 days earlier, the pulse of energy would have struck the earth and power structures would have gone down for decades.  Goodbye Internet, electricity and comfortable life. Hello Victorian times!

Aside from a solar flare or a similar apocalyptic event knocking out our power grid, this tech dependent life is here to stay, and so are our re-wired brains. We are all bloody addicts. Some of us can’t even have a bowel movement without untethering from our phones.

This constant state of partial attention is not innocuous.

In the article, The New Midlife Crisis For Women: Why (and How) it’s Hitting Gen X Women, Ada Calhoun writes:

More than one in five women are on antidepressants. An awful lot of middle-aged women are furious and overwhelmed. What we don’t talk about enough is how the deck is stacked against them feeling any other way.

[Middle-aged women] are smoking in their bedrooms out the window the way they did when they were 16,” says Elizabeth Earnshaw, a marriage and family therapist in Philadelphia. They’re flirting with old boyfriends via email or compulsively shopping online. They’re driving too fast, or they’re drinking too much, or they’re popping Xanax.

And 24/7 they’re on their smartphones (which, remember, have only been around for 10 years), flooded with friends’ Instagram-tastic vacation photos and Twitter posts by frenemies bragging about promotions. They’re watching breaking news alerts of nuclear threat escalations, end-times weather catastrophes, terrifying mass violence. They’re waking up to see what else has gone wrong and wondering how to help. They’re fielding long 10 p.m. emails from bosses that end with “Thoughts?” The cumulative effect is the feeling that they will never catch up, on any level, ever.

But we can take a stand. How? It is time to show the shithead in your hot little hands who is boss. It is time to dole out some solitary confinement to the time-sucking demon and set some boundaries. 

Let’s get started, shall we?