Heads Up: Great New Life Loading!

By 2025 the number of mobile devices in use worldwide is expected to reach more than 18bn. That’s more than two for every person on this planet!

Mobile technology has become indispensable for certain day-to-day applications … but some keep us ‘heads down’ with features that are highly addictive but with questionable value when it comes to promoting quality of life.

In this episode Bill considers the emergent heads-down culture and suggests that we should try to resist being victims of its insidious effects.

Awards for New Insights On Life:

• Top 10 Life Coaching related Podcasts in the UK by Feedspot.
• Top 10 personal development podcasts in South Africa by millionpodcasts. 

New Insights is a Life Coach Training company with websites serving Africa and the UK/International:

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Transcript

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Heads-Up: Great New Life Loading


Few, nowadays, would be naïve enough to argue that mobile technology has not had a profound effect on the way we live our lives.

However, thanks, in no small measure, to the advent of social media, many will argue that it has contributed a net negative effect when it comes to the overall quality of our lives.

‘Fingertip functionality”

I’ll be the first to admit that mobile technology has delivered the convenience of ‘fingertip functionality’ in spades.

In just a few clicks we can pinpoint exactly where we are in the world, send an instant message to family or friends, look up a restaurant menu, hail a taxi, order groceries, translate a sign in a foreign language, and the list goes on.

Great, yes … but it’s not all champagne and roses!

The “heads-down” culture

Social media and gaming platforms have jumped at the opportunity to harness the convenience of mobile technology to render their frighteningly addictive offerings ubiquitous.   

It is this combination of mobile technology and social media that is the primary driver of what I call the ‘heads-down’ culture that has recently emerged among people from all walks of life, but particularly the younger generation, who have never been exposed to another way.

Not long ago I grabbed the arm of a “heads-down” young friend who I was walking with and yanked them out of the path of a speeding electric scooter. 

Window on the world

An interesting discussion ensued about the habitual tendency of many nowadays to walk everywhere while transfixed by their mobile phone screens.

“It gives us instant connectivity to, and an instant window on, the world around us,” argued my friend.

There is an obvious attraction to this but like anything in life, too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.

I imagined someone with a fascination for the wider universe peering continuously through the tiny eyepiece of a giant telescope. No matter how wondrous the sights that the telescope might reveal, never looking away would seriously distort one’s perspective of the world that exists under one’s feet!

FOMO and discomfort

Of course, if you become so used to, and immersed in, the view afforded by the telescope, taking time out to survey your local environment might mean missing out on a new development in the wider universe!

Not only that, but dealing with the all too real but ‘unfamiliar’ local environment might leave you feeling a little uncomfortable or even scared!

And this combination of FOMO in the digital world, and general discomfort with the physical world, goes directly to the heart of the reason why the ‘heads-down’ culture is becoming so prevalent.

Look around you and observe

Next time you find yourself in a coffee shop, restaurant, or anywhere designed for physical socialising or bringing people together, look around you.

Take time to observe the shocking degree to which people choose to go “heads-down”, immersing themselves in their comfortable digital worlds rather than interacting with the real world around them.

We humans were not designed to restrict our focus to such tiny screens for such lengthy periods. Our mental health – not to mention our eyes and other sensory organs – is dependent on the varied and authentic stimulation that nature, our surroundings, and other people, have to offer.

Determination and courage needed

It takes both determination and courage to swim against the tide and try to break, or at least seriously curtail, the heads-down habit.

After all, powerful vested marketing interests are hard at work to keep people mesmerised by their mobile device screens. They operate by engaging our imaginations, appealing to our egos, and playing to our FOMO.

But for those who can recognise the heads-down culture for what it is – and the toxic effect it can have on physical and social health in the longer-term – there is much to gain by choosing to live ‘heads-up’ whenever practical.

Nature, and the physical world, has so much more to offer us than the convenient and enticing, yet misleading, one-dimensional, ego-driven, digital world.

Great new life loading

If you are bold enough to admit to a ‘heads-down’ addiction, try an experiment. 

Go heads-up for two weeks. During that period, take time to carefully study the heads-down crowd around you and their general obliviousness to the people and environment around them. 

Then decide for yourself who and what is truly important in your life.

Spoiler alert …

… Great new life loading :-)