Take me back to the 90’s

We were all seated trying to behave responsibly while awaiting the next session of the ongoing seminar.

A fine young man walked in, introduced himself as the guest speaker.

While I was won by his cute demeanor, how neatly he dressed, the fluency of his English though without understanding what came from his lips, I was forced back to reality when I heard him say,

“if you want to make it in life, begin by selling your phone”.

He is not serious, is he?
How can he make such statement?
What century is this young man from?
How will I browse my assignments or catch up with latest happenings around the world or chat with my friends and so on?

Funny enough, there is this hard truth associated with the statement above.

Let me just ask a question.

How many times have you picked up your smartphone for the sole purpose of reading up a book you downloaded or solving assignments without a peep into your notifications, playing a game to reach a particular level, visiting all social networks ranging from Facebook to twitter, instagram, whatsapp and so on.

I do not know about you but I am 100% guilty of this.

As if the time misappropriation on all these is not enough, it has gone further to convert some of us into boring introverts.

I was at a dinner with some colleagues and you can guess what it was like.

After the usual introduction of getting to know the members of my table, it seemed like a cloud of dumbness came upon us, forcing us to look down at what really seemed to matter and guess what, we got lost in our phones.
What a boring dinner.

Likewise, this phone has eaten deep into our productivity in life.

For instance, this particular post should have been published about a month ago but I found it lazy to conclude and edit it because I had pings to reply, candy crush and criminal case games to play, pictures to entertain me on instagram until my battery went down. It is same for about four articles yet to be published.

For those of us who are not so disciplined in handling such things, do you not think the speaker was rather correct?

The one that bothers me most is that of friendship.

I realized that I have more virtual friends than real friends.
Friends who would project fake moments of their lives such as posing in front of a borrowed car or posting a photoshopped picture to make you feel jealous of why you are not born a Kardashian….smh.

We all want to meet up with the centuries’ idea of knowing “what’s-up” and feeling like we belong…fake lives everywhere…smh.

Back in the 90’s, I had them real people.
No social network to distract us. We would gather at one house and watch a particular movie.
It was real fun just as when guys watch football together.

We played games which gave us an ability to work as a team, communicate well, tolerating one another, competing with each other healthily while accepting defeat happily.

Life was way healthier with all those outdoor activities than sitting one place pressing phone and telling Mr Obesity, “here, I come”.

We wrote letters and they were so pure as they contained well thought out lines that you would want to keep each letter you received as special.

With our real friends, we were able to grow as we aimed at edifying each other, correcting one another when we went wrong.

But what do we have now, people who would even exaggerate on your wrong posts just for you to see them as the good people.
I also believe we knew less evil then, trust me.

I would have even preferred the 80s as old fashioned as I may seem but unfortunately, I will only recount other peoples’ experiences because I am of the 90s.

Let us try as much as possible not to idolize these technologies but use them in moderation

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