The soul in me is withering. I’ll call it a soul – whatever the thing is that is woven through this body, whatever the substance of the self may be. 

It is tied up in too many threads, pulling in too many directions. Connections leading to places I’ve never felt beneath my feet, to people I’ve never breathed the same air as. I am tied and twisted and smothered by the tinny sound of the whole world screaming through a screen.

Consume. Scroll. Consume. 

A phone is such a tiny object to hold such oceanic presence – pixels churning before my vision, eroding away my psyche in slow, methodical rushes. Locked into a never-ending reel of sensation, doom and longing. What have I lost to the staring years? What have all the screen moments leeched out of me? I do not know, and not knowing is perhaps the worst part. Something is different, changed, altered, but I cannot point to it and say, ‘Here is what is gone.’ I cannot show you a picture of the lack. 

My thoughts hover like corpse flies around the research and the articles that confirm the alarm-bell knowing that has been crying through my head. Look up. Look around. We are a sea of cyborgs, rewiring our minds to a screen. The reorganization of our somatosensory systems and cognitive cortexes is occurring in real time, the hours spent in front of our technological tethers chipping away at our mental resources. We offload our memory circuits to a device and wonder why we are so forgetful. We bombard our brains with hundreds of stories an hour in an endless scroll and believe the problem of our attention spans is a disorder and not a consequence. We slouch and hunch and curl ourselves around the TV’s glow and say we just don’t know where our health problems could be coming from. 

As if this is what we were meant for. As is life can be distilled into a blue light offering. As if I am not wasting away beside you.

I do not like this feeling of quiet enslavement. I do not like that my hand is invisibly leashed, always reaching unconsciously for the phone. That I browse the internet incessantly for something to dull my mind to. That I watch the screen for hours, slowly disappearing, and barely remember a thing I’ve seen in all that devotional time. This is not a life, it’s a stalemate. Hoping that the pretty images will echo into reality. Hoping that adventure will come knocking at my door. Hoping that I’ll find the motivation if only I stumble upon the right post, the perfect words, the correct dosage of shame and inspiration. This is not progress. This is a sickness. 

It is a pollution of the mind, a perversion of the mind, a removal of the self from that which makes us most powerful. We can think deeper and farther than the bounds of our bodies, the constraints of our instincts. The direction our thoughts turn towards does indeed play a role in the reality we experience. It is not perception bias; it is energetic influence – the decoherence of infinite possibility into singular effect through the power of focus and belief. Yet we face an insidious insurrection. One that is subtle, with its reaching tendrils of addictive dopamine hits, designed to ensnare you, entrap you, entice you.

We are fighting an elusive battle. But I wonder – is the enemy the screen or the self? 

What responsibility do we hold for ourselves? We are up against a rigged system, but the prize is our actual lives – real and lived. Where you feel the weight of the minutes going by. Where curiosity leads you out the door. Where emotions belong to the place you exist in. The cost and the currency of this modern age is our attention, a thing that once given can never be gotten back. It is not a renewable resource, so why do we dispense it with such indifference? Why do we treat it as anything but significant? Why do I, despite all of this questioning, still find myself in the doomscroll purgatory of digital living?

I cannot reconcile the distance between knowing something is harmful and choosing not to engage with it. It is a fallacy of the mind, to be so tempted and to fall so easily. How do we claim autonomy once more? How do we return to the real world and stay there? How do we begin to treasure boredom? To think more critically? To question and engage with depth and intention? I don’t want a life captured in the moments I remember to look up.

I want to climb mountains. I want to see the world. I want to write books and poems and essays. I want to paint and draw and craft. I want to linger in the sunshine. I want to try and fail and try again. I want to learn slowly. I want to wander and wonder and know each precious moment of the day. I could, I know I could. I could take my pen to the page and bleed. I could create magic out of colour. I could cry like a wolf from the tops of mountains, swim like a fey creature through the waters of the sea. I could, I could, I long to. 

And still, I turn to the screen.

Tired girl. Torn apart girl. Turned towards the shadows that dance upon the walls. I do not believe that I will never get up, never step outside the proverbial cave. I am within the legion of dreamers attempting to break free. To return to the child-self that played amongst the tree branches, listening to what the leaves whispered. 

The answers are not in me. They are out there, in the wide world and the whirling winds. In the places beyond the comfort of windows and walls. In the faces of strangers and strange creatures I’ve yet to meet or know. They are a song that calls you outward. They exist in sweat and tears and laughter and the comfort of a touch. The answers are not in a thought, but an action. 

There is hope in every small moment of resistance. There is power in every questioning thought. There is authority in each and every one of us to choose the lives we seek to live. To set aside the phone or the tablet, to turn off the tv, to breathe and forgive and keep trying. What is more human than anything is the resilience to rise above the odds.

Get up. Go. It’s your life that’s waiting for you.