Ene Elizabeth Adeka
Ever met a dumb smart phone user?
I recently had a conversation with a friend and out of the blues I asked her when she was getting married. The look she gave me had me thinking I had grown a second head in the seconds it had taken me to pop the question.
“Nah,” she said with a casual wave of the hand. “It’s too early for me to think about marriage,” she continued even as she pulled out her phone and headed straight to #BellaNaijaWeddings on Instagram.
I actually had broken a fundamental rule in the Holy Book of Etiquettes: “Never ask people when they hope to get married.” But you see, sometimes we create rules to help us avoid the questions we do not want to ask ourselves.
The following week, a younger acquaintance hit me up and in the middle of talking about the quirks and pitfalls of freelancing; we veered off into the world of “After University and NYSC (for the Nigerian Undergraduate), What Next?” At the end of a long discussion, she asked, “What should I expect after school?”
Google It All
From “How To” to “How Not To” articles, the solutions offered online come in different pdf formats, blog pages and self-help e-books. Yet never before has there been a generation where the average person is clueless about career, work-life balance or the “next level” like ours. Many people attribute the confusion in the lives of millenials to information overload. I call it “The Auto-Correct Effect.”
Are You A “Smart” Smart Phone?
In an age of lighted screens and pre-formatted conversations, the potency of thinking for ourselves has been reduced to a bare minimum. It is true that technology and artificial intelligence has come to stay and has inarguably simplified life and living.
However, it also has not left us without teeth marks that serve as telltale signs of the damaging consequences and growing impact of advanced technology on youth lifestyle.
If you are a smartphone user, then you should be familiar with predictive text. While prediction is sometimes good for conversations, it has made us lazy.
If you do not believe me, try having a normal conversation online, without turning on your predictive text. Auto-correct has saved lives and time in the virtual world however, reality has no auto-correct.
The Auto-Correct Effect
We put off doing the needful hoping that it would take care of itself in the future forgetting that if anything is to be, then it is up to us to make it happen. A life not intentionally lived does not auto-correct itself with time, mistakes, bad habits and lack of drive, passion or commitment to worthy life pursuits cannot be auto-corrected.
Some people are stranded despite having an updated version of Google Map on their phones. Perhaps when all has been said and done, we ought to know now more than ever that no matter how smart our smart phones are, we have got to do our own growing, thinking and living. Your smart phone will:
- Aid your thinking and creative process. However, you still have got to put in some work. Nothing beats the good old DIY.
- Your smart phone can boost productivity levels. However, it can also be a major source of distraction and procrastination. Mind the minutes, when you are online is our no.1 advice especially if you are a regular social media user.
- Your smart phone is your greatest friend and your greatest enemy. Depending on what you do with it, your smart phone can either make you or mar you.
But hey! Auto-correct work great wonders especially when your predictive text is on, just make sure your life is on manual correct. Sometimes, you just have to hit airplane mode, take some time off social media to think without having to post “what’s on your mind” on Facebook and plan for the future for real.
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