Millennial Mind
Water, water everywhere, but no Wi-Fi for surfing
How I survived five days out at sea with no Internet
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"My boyfriend's average screen time this week was 14 minutes per day."
Two weeks ago, someone somewhere sent this tweet, and my phone thought it important that I know this had happened.
A notification of the tweet lit up my screen, based on an algorithm I had long stopped trying to understand. But even with no knowledge of who the poster was, the tweet hit a sore spot.
Once, possibly 15 years ago, my own statistic would not have been too far from this. Now - I quickly hazarded a check - I was averaging almost six hours of screen time a day, or a third of the time I spend awake.
My first mobile phone was a Motorola, which I got while in primary school in the early 2000s. It was used mainly for a mobile tennis game that I played for about half an hour a day after dinner, and only secondarily to answer any calls from my parents.
Then, I had a Samsung flip phone, followed by my first iPhone, and the rest is history - a gradual encroachment of the device into my life that closely corresponded with smartphones gaining features that allowed people to do more and more things on the go.
In 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, the first touchscreen phone with a built-in MP3 player and a Web browser.
By 2008, it had an App Store, 3G data and Global Positioning System. In 2010, it gained a front-facing camera and FaceTime. Siri and iCloud arrived in 2011. In 2017, Face ID and wireless charging were added.
Today, much like most people I know, I use the six-inch slab to do just about everything. Two weeks ago, when I got sick, I asked it questions about my symptoms, all while sniffling into a tissue in my sheets - to the detriment of my increasingly hunched shoulders, stiff neck and bleary eyes.
A GOLDEN TICKET
In the same week that I read the tweet, fate - in the form of my mother's birthday - thrust upon me an opportunity to shake this curse.
The Yong family was going on a five-day cruise, a prospect I was at first not enthused about. But my mother has never been particularly democratic about the ways we spend our time, and she was not going to make an exception on her birthday.
On board, I realised I had bigger problems: Wi-Fi, the free provision of which should by now be enshrined as a fundamental right, was, shockingly, payable.
Even more unexpected was the price for it, charged per day per device, ranging between US$20 (S$27.80) and US$30.
There was not much to and fro between my sister and I before we decided it was unconscionable to pay that amount of money for Internet access - probably what the cruise intended anyway, we thought: to create a bubble on water in which people had no choice but to have fun with the activities available on board.
Yet, in that moment, deep in the embers of my Internet-over-reliant soul, I would be remiss to not mention a glimmer of excitement - this was the golden ticket back to a world before I succumbed to the Internet.
Finally, I was returning to a state of nature, Rousseau style!
I put down my phone, checked the hard-copy catalogue for activities on board and made plans - pen on paper, for good measure - as a symbol of my return to an Edenic, pre-technology century.
Over the next few days, through the night-time song-and-dance shows, the water sports, the complimentary three-course meals, I noticed changes in my behaviour and temperament.
Without an Internet connection, the phone stayed in my pocket for longer stretches of time when I was out of the cabin, rather than being placed screen-up on the dinner table or even just held in my hand when walking.
At meals, I began participating more wholeheartedly in conversations. By the pool, I could read for extended stretches of time without any distracting notifications buzzing or even the impulse to check the time.
And in the morning, rather than having the screen force light into my eyes first thing, I wiggled my toes awake, and plodded to the balcony to take in the fresh ocean air.
One evening, my family and I took an evening stroll out on the deck and fortuitously caught the most gorgeous sunset.
We took some photos, but after that settled into deckchairs and watched the lightly pulsating ball of light sink and change the colours of all the sky around it.
Taking in the mottled ocean and the swirling clouds, I suddenly understood Impressionism, an art style I had always found cloying.
I wanted to know the names of all the colours, noticing for the first time the shades of orange, russet, gold, copper and pink that make up a sunset.
By the end of the five-day trip, my average daily screen time was an hour. A single charge of my phone battery lasted three days, compared with half a day before the cruise.
More importantly, I felt more at ease, rested. It was a proper vacation.
BACK TO REALITY
A week after returning to shore, my screen time is once more at four hours per day, and there is mild panic - that my experiment had come to nought, and that I will never be able to regain that feeling of being exactly where I needed to be that I had enjoyed out at sea.
But I also knew that the hour of screen time per day was impossible to replicate in real life.
As a journalist, I have an innate interest in the goings-on around the world. More practically, I have to respond to my colleagues, arrange meeting times with contacts and get on calls to clarify things with newsmakers.
With the ease of connectivity back in Singapore, I was also once more on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok. I was on WhatsApp and Telegram. I was using transport apps CDG Zig, Grab and Gojek, and food delivery apps foodpanda and Deliveroo.
All of these edged up my screen time, even if each use was only for a few minutes. My solution has been to pay more attention to each time I pick up and unlock my phone, asking myself whether I really need to google something that instant.
Can that message be replied to together with others that will stream in later?
Do I really have to take a photo of this really funny poster? (Although in this instance, the answer was an unequivocal yes.)
My fatigue with technology is not unique. While many surveys show Gen Z folks still spending many hours online, a few reports are emerging of social media fatigue in this group.
Data published by Pew Research Centre shows that users between 18 and 25 years old are the only age group to see a decrease in social media use since 2019.
Anecdotally, I can see that people my age are posting less on Instagram. Extended texting has become something to avoid, and people are centring their mental and physical health more, preferring to carve out personal time to go to the beach, hit the gym, do some yoga or meditate.
For the rest of the year, I am joining the movement to ditch the phone. If I have to, I will hide it behind my bookshelf so it does not even enter my consciousness, as I did when I first started work and was immediately added to six group chats.
I invite you to join me.
My fatigue with technology is not unique. While many surveys show Gen Z folks still spending many hours online, a few reports are emerging of social media fatigue in this group. Data published by Pew Research Centre show that users between 18 and 25 years old are the only age group to see a decrease in social media use since 2019.
