EMBRACE THE SCREEN

It’s funny when folks from our parents generation say we live stuck to a screen, when they have also been bitten by the same bug.

Growing up, I remember families having as much as 3, 4 TV screens in their homes. Parlour TV, small parlour TV, visitors parlour TV, mummy and daddy’s room TV, ati bee bee lo.

Let’s realize and accept that watching pixels change color is fascinating. Plus, much of our daily activities are done in front of a screen. Alarms that wake us up, bank activities, trade, meetings, time with family and friends, market, exercise trainers, diary, planner and our friggin work. It’s all on the screen.

So reject the screen, refuse to download that bank mobile app that’ll save you several long trips to the bank, because you prefer to be shouting, “Dele! Dele! Cheque yen ti bounce”, on the phone. Reject the screen, drive all the way to Chicken Republic only to hear they are out of Chicken (This happened), then someone bashes your car as you try to drive out of their lot. Reject the screen…oh you get it by now.

Say what you will, but the screen does make life easy, bridges long distances like the person was right in front of you. Sure, we will look away from the screen now and then to observe and appreciate the things immediately around us, but there’s no difference between our living.

I bet the invention of writing made ‘people less focused on what was around them’ initially, until the instructions needed for most activities needed to be read.

Embrace the screen. It is not the enemy. And its time will pass like everything else under the sky. Time washes away the most ‘indelible’ scripts, and all things, even the most advanced and out of the box, must eventually become primitive.