I have spoken to a number of people (someones) recently who have admitted to playing some 2-3 hours plus games online virtually every day, some days even up to 8 -10 hours, especially if the weather was inclement. Of course that’s a good reason to remain indoors and vegetate, right? Another someone cited the reason for playing daily was that the animals would die if one didn’t play every single day; that is the imagined animals in the hypothetical farm. That’s reason enough to play every day, right? No-one wants their animals to die!
The next part of the conversation went on to calculating how many hours this meant over a longer time frame. So this is how it went.
2 hours/day = 14 hours/week = 728 hours/year = 30.33 days/year spent on ONE game.
Now if this was 3 hours/day = 21 hours/week = 1092 hours/year = 45.5 days/year spent on ONE game.
Either way, that’s one plus months per year spent on one game!!!!! Every twelve years it’s a year of your life. Who would have thought?……..idle time tending to animals in an imaginary farm. That’s a great way to relax, and wind down right?
These someones were individually shell-shocked by the calculation!! “I never thought of it this way” someone said in complete disbelief, head shaking and spinning into sympathetic nervous system overload.
I followed this up with a query whether this particular someone had been doing the daily exercise (just walking) that we had talked about, and which might be helpful for one’s physical and mental health and well-being. The very quick, automatic answer was “I didn’t have time”. Valid reason, right? Those animals are way more important than one’s well-being, and there’s so many of them.
Now this is where it gets device-ive. We’re talking about any/all devices here, right. It’s easy to see this as an observer of someone else, and make judgments upon their behaviour and justifications, but do we actually observe our own habits on whatever the electronic device might be and how we choose to spend our time, whether it be in the home environment, dining out at a restaurant, in the company of others etc.
I confess that this someone has become a Netflix “addict” in recent times, and something of a “voyeur” on Facebook in another life of course, an obsessive “save-er” on Pinterest who has hundreds of followers of folders and pins I rarely go back to…….And then I wonder why “I didn’t have time” comes out of MY mouth for the various creative pursuits I would love to have achieved in bygone days and months.
If, just if it were a month (that’s 30 lots of 24 hours) I might have spent over the past year watching Netflix (hypothetically of course), then maybe I would have completed the Snapfish photo-books of the overseas trips from ten years ago, decluttered every room of my home, reduced the sewing pile in my craft room, produced the hand-made gifts and cards I promised myself I would make for many someones‘ birthdays this year, added to my life journal “Whatever makes you happy” on a more regular basis, spent more time in the great outdoors, played more strategy games, had more fun, learned to dance, played the piano…..and so the list goes on! Oh, that list is just ridiculously endless.
But then our human mind is amazingly wonderful at justification……I work hard, right! Of course I deserve some down time!
Human behaviour is pretty complex……….therein lies the device-iveness!
