A Decade, Gone

10 years. If you're 24, imagine going back to when you were 14, and everything you've lived since then, all of it... didn’t exist.

sorry?

10 years.

A decade spent on your phone, numb?

Because that’s what the phone does, and why we love it.

It allows us to escape.

To numb our thoughts.

To not feel so much, or maybe to feel something, finally.

When we're on our phones, we laugh, we read, we chat...We even fall in love with people (sometimes… just by watching a video on our feed… but let’s not talk about that).

We need our phones.

It's as simple as that. Humanity can’t and won’t go back.

But we do dream of love stories without DMs. A look on the bus with a stranger that turns into an exchange of smiles, then into something more. Yet in reality, we post a story on IG, craving validation from strangers. We post, then scroll. 1 hour. 2 hours. 4 hours.

Oh no. It happened again?????

It’s 1am. I really should sleep.

1:30am.

Damn it!!!!

Why?

I wish there was an answer.

But why don’t we care?

4 hours a day means a decade will simply... vanish??? How marvellous of us.

There is nothing more precious to our fragile humanity than time.

Nothing more sacred, and yet, nothing that can become vain more easily in the digital world.

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

"William Shakespeare, Richard II

But also, we create our own time. And yet, it's the one thing we can never control. That's so tough...

"Time is a created thing. To say 'I don’t have time' is like saying 'I don’t want to."

'Lao Tzu (attributed)

Cmon Lucio said it in "De brevitate vitae" like a million years ago, and here we are?! ( 49 AD )

Lucio Anneo Seneca, the Latin philosopher, said life isn't short...we just make it short by filling it with occupationes. Not necessarily bad things (fun, work, love) but the silent, invisible moments in between… they add up.

The videos we watch while waiting for the bus.

The posts we make during concerts.

The sunrise we see… through our camera app.

Then comes guilt.

Do we feel it? No. Not really.

It’s not guilt. It’s numbness.

And numbness is worse than guilt.

Because guilt can wake you up.

Numbness keeps you still.

The helplessness isn’t just in how addicted we are.

It’s in how addicted we’re willing to stay.

How we've accepted that this is the future.

Digital. Fast. Filtered. Fleeting.

But let’s be honest.

The phone isn’t the problem.

It’s a tool. A mirror. An amplifier. Sure, it nudges you. It’s full of traps. Hooks (HOOK MODEL, YES!). Notifications. Infinite scrolls designed to keep you there.

But it's not the enemy.

Our mind is.

Why don’t we care more?

Why?

And maybe that’s the hardest truth.

We know.

We know it’s eating away at us.

We know we’re trading silence for static, presence for pixels.

And still, we scroll.

Because unlike other addictions, this one isn’t hidden.

It’s celebrated.

Branded.

Monetised.

Rewarded.

And the worst part?

You’re not even doing something bad. You’re laughing. You’re catching up. You’re staying “informed.”You’re “relaxing.”You’re just existing in the modern world.

But time doesn’t care if it’s wasted beautifully or tragically.

It passes just the same.

And so a decade slips through the cracks. Not with a bang, but with a soft click. A flick of the thumb.

"You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it."

Charles Buxton

So maybe it’s not about deleting apps. Not a digital detox. Not switching to a flip phone or escaping to a forest.

Maybe it starts with noticing.

Not just how many hours you spend, but how you feel after them.

Not just what you saw, but what you missed.

The faces you didn’t look at. The thoughts you didn’t think. The conversations that never happened. The silence you avoided.

And yet... here we are. Half-present in every moment. AirPods in. Notifications on.

Eyes glazed. Bodies in rooms, but minds somewhere else.

Everywhere, and nowhere.

What scares me isn’t how much time we lose. WELL THAT TOO (10 YEARS, REALLY?)

nice.

It’s how normal it feels. The disconnection.

The sleep-deprived eyes.

The quiet panic when the WiFi’s down (or not so quiet).

The way we reach for our phones the second there’s a gap in...conversation, in the elevator, at red lights, in bed. Even in joy. Even in grief????

We have stopped sitting with ourselves (I always think I couldn't do what old people do, just SIT in bench? like staring at what?)

Stopped listening.

Stopped feeling the weight of being alive... because there’s always a feed to numb that.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Blaise Pascal

We are so afraid of silence.

Because silence reveals things.

The dreams we’ve delayed. The loneliness we’ve masked with filtered photos and well-timed likes.

The phone keeps it all away (and our shows too?)

Until it doesn’t.

Until you look up and realize you don’t remember the last year. Not really.

Just flashes.

Just fragments. (Maybe those of which you have photos of and you see when you scroll you camera on the plane?)

A hundred blurry snapshots of a life half-lived.

You weren’t born to scroll.

You weren’t born to consume an endless stream of other people’s lives while yours waits quietly in the background, hoping to be noticed.

So no. This isn’t a guilt trip.

This is a gentle alarm.

Not to wake you up.

But to ask:

Are you okay with trading off 4h per day for a decade? And when is the last time you were truly awake?