During the Christmas holiday, I was more than elated to travel upcountry to reunite with my family. It was a time to rid myself of the busy city life and the anti-social nature of my colleagues and friends. And by anti-social I mean not talking to each other because they are ever busy fumbling with their phones. Well, I can’t say am better off but at least I try to make a conversation.

So I get home and am happy to meet everyone. We talk about the latest developments in the village and when the stories are supposedly exhausted, everyone turns to their phones. I thought this was city madness only. Beyond constantly looking at our phones, we were all living in our phones. Our phones were our operative consciousness, creating a virtual reality where our brain was not present — even when our screen was off.

You meet people in the streets and you nearly knock down some of them because they are busy responding to Tinder matches or even taking selfies to update their Instagram accounts. Here is a tip, give that nigger a blow of their life and act as if it was an accident. Trust me they will think twice before pulling out that phone on the street again.

There is great danger as our real and digital worlds have seamlessly morphed into one. It has become very hard for us to escape our digital consciousness and be present in reality. Think of a day when you went out with your groupies and in the middle of meaningless conversations that remained uninteresting and unsophisticated, more focus was channeled on the best location to update their Snapchat story and what hashtag to contribute to. Beyond loss of consciousness, the human subconscious is also under siege.

We all love our phones. I do, very much. In fact if I was going somewhere and realized after 5km that I have forgotten my phone, I will go back for it. We can’t just imagine a world without smartphones. They are good at creating different worlds that allow us to sometimes escape the real life for a few minutes, which is fantastic.

But, when our phone becomes our brain and we can’t stop thinking about that work email, Snapchat story, Instagram caption, incoming text message or Tinder response, we become consumed and are not actually living.

Can we promise ourselves that we will engage more deeply with the people around us, look up when we walk along the streets and appreciate the detail that other humans have created,

Let’s draw the line between digital life and actual life. Let’s keep the digital world from bleeding into and distracting us from the reality.

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