by Jenna Bloom ‘21

We live in a world where everything is easily accessible to us. We scroll for hours on apps that show us a new picture or video every couple of seconds, and everything is fast-moving and quickly rewarded to us. Daily news comes to us in a couple of words, and all of our friends are just a text away. It makes it so we have little-to-no time to reflect or analyze what is happening. But how exactly is this affecting us?

The National Centre for Biotechnology Information has claimed that the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. Look at what’s happening around us — when we wake up, we check our phones. When we’re waiting in a long line somewhere, we check our phones. When there is a break in conversation, we check our phones. The problem is, that is our new social norm. This is what we are used to. We as a society need to retrain ourselves to rely less on our phones and more on ourselves. Whether it is a new no-phones-at-the-dinner-table rule, deactivating social media for a little while, or picking up a phone-less hobby, there is a lot we can do to change our ways and start living in the moment more.