Screens!

May 16th, 2020| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

What with COVID-19 and all that, you might be thinking you spend a lot of time staring at a screen—on your phone, your computer, or your TV. Well, you would be right in such thinking.

The average adult, the findings of a recent survey indicate, will spend not months, not years, but decades staring at their devices.

This was the result of a poll of 2,000 adults in the UK. Thirty-four staggering years (yes, 34!) were spent looking at phones, computers, and TVs. In brief, from ages 18–81, the average person is glued to one screen or another for over 13 hours a day.

(And from a rough calculation, yes, I came close to that yesterday, myself. Maybe because it was a teledermatology day, but still …)

13 hours a day = 4,745 hours a year = 294,190 hours in 62 adult years = 34 years!

4 hours a day on a laptop. 3½ in front of the TV. 2½ on their phones. The rest on tablets, gaming devices, e-readers, and such.

No doubt the pandemic did some of this to us, locking us into screen-staring with nothing much else to do, nowhere to go, nobody to fellowship with.

More than half the respondents confessed their eyes were strained. Over a tenth of the folks acknowledged they never take a break. The Journal of Thrombosis and Thrombolysis warned that those sitting for long periods of time had almost twice the risk of developing deep vein thrombosis as someone moving around.

And adults’ eyeballs are stuck to their devices from the minute they wake up: screen-watching began, on average, within 20 minutes of getting out of bed. A large proportion said they commenced screen-gazing within 5 minutes—on their phones (27% of men; 20% of women).

13 hours a day. Oh, and these same folks, if they were parents, said their kids were spending too much time on their devices, too. A quarter of couples have actually had fights about their partner’s 13 hours of screen time.

Vision Direct (the agency that sponsored the survey) recommends everyone use the “20-20-20 Rule” when looking at their screens: break after 20 minutes, look away for 20 seconds, at something 20 feet away.

And most respondents agreed that less than half of that time was used productively.

An interesting psalm in the Bible, Psalm 101, is focused on the leader and his commitment to live with integrity personally and communally.

Among that person’s criteria for personal integrity is this:

I will walk within my house in the blamelessness of my heart.
I will set no worthless thing before my eyes.
Psalm 101:2–3

And correspondingly in the section on communal integrity we read this:

The one who secretly slanders his neighbor—him will I silence;
The lofty of eyes and broad of heart [i.e., greedy]—him will I not endure.
My eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me;
He who walks in a blameless way is the one who will minister to me.
He shall not dwell within my house—the worker of deceit;
The speaker of falsehood—he shall not stand before my eyes.
Psalm 101:5–7

Notice that both sections deal with “blamelessness.” Both have “heart.” And “my house.” But critically, both have “eyes” (in white). Both in responsibility for personal life and for corporate life, the leader is accountable: the buck stops with that person. Integrity before God will be their highest priority, for themselves and for the ones they lead. Particularly in what all of them look at.

Save 34 years!

SOURCES:
StudyFinds.org; VisionDirect.co.uk