A few days ago, I had the sobering realization that there probably would not be any great art of lasting interest produced from our generation – we simply do not have the free time or opportunity for boredom enough for that. But where is all this time going? The day still has 24 hours to its name as far I’m aware. Me, for instance, I wake up at 6.45 every morning. I'm in class by 8.30. I leave college by 1.30 and I go to sleep at around 12.00AM on average, later most days. Now try to keep up as I attempt some pretty complicated mathematical calculations here. From 1.30 PM in the afternoon to 1.30 AM at midnight (I lied when I said 12.00, hehe), how do I occupy these round 12 hours of “free” time? This is uncharted territory, ladies and gentlemen. I haven't ever given much thought to this question, in fact I’ve turned all my energy into not thinking about this question for well over twelve months now. So. I reach home. I take the time to unwind from a day of hard work – sitting still in a classroom and trying to pay my wandering attention to a lecture or two. Much like a demon trying to straighten the tail of the dog from that folktale, this often proves to be a futile exercise. Once back home, I open Instagram by default. Sometimes recently, I find my fingers performing this task even two turns ahead of my house. I cannot even keep my attention on the simple task of walking and observing, can’t listen to my own thoughts for more than 10 minutes at a time.
If we are to believe the dominant discourse on social media, the only purpose I should be using Instagram for is to catch up with my friends and share updates about my life. But as any social media user can tell you, this is the bare minimum and often rarely what we open our apps for. Seeing my friends updates takes but a few measly minutes of my time. There's still the lion’s share of my free 12 hours remaining, stretching ahead like a vast and empty (and unscheduled) ocean. I scroll down. This is my first pitfall, where I make my first mistake, a mistake I have committed willingly over and over a million times, every day since that fateful day sometime in 2019 when I was first bought a cellphone to take with me to college. When Zuckerberg invented Facebook with the intention of keeping in contact with your faraway forgotten friends, he didn't mention, didn't know probably, that a mere ten years down the lane, 20-somethings from a tiny Indian corner of the globe would find themselves extremely invested in people making Swedish bread half a hemisphere away. I watch, I scroll.
Keep scrolling, don't stop. These apps are designed with that aim in mind, you know. I check the time now. I have a million things to get done. My To-do list has featured the same overflowing items since Monday, and it's almost Friday. But it's only 3 o clock… Soon my eyes become tired. I somehow find the energy to close Instagram. But my mind craves for more, more colour, more sound, more distraction more everything– the only thing I want less of, is me and my own thoughts. A minute alone with my own self is enough to produce that all too familiar feeling of queasiness, the nausea that comes with the guilt of knowing that you have wasted precious hours of your day when you had SO MUCH to get done. You know, something similar to that queasy feeling in your stomach when you’ve indulged in too much oily food. An intellectual bloating, so to speak. You find that you can't breathe. You need something, anything, to get as far as possible from your stifling thoughts, the rising panic and guilt in your chest that leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth. You start regretting, you’ve done something bad, you shouldn’t have wasted so much time. Oh and your head hurts…you cannot think straight. You feel as though someone’s covered your whole brain in wool, nothing’s sharp anymore, nothing works anymore.
Oh you try. You have tried. You've been trying since two months into Covid season when the Dalgona coffee and the daily carom games with your family got old and you found yourself scarfing down entire seasons of never-ending American tv shows like popcorn. Since you found yourself waking up from a deep slumber one day and you simply weren’t…all quite there as you were before. By now you're used to the headaches, the nausea, the guilt, the eyestrain – the mind boggling effort it takes to focus on something other than Netflix, the absolute inability to read books when you were devouring entire classics at age 13 – you wonder where that girl went and deep inside you mourn her death because you know she won’t be coming back. Where did that brain which solved entire trigonometric equations in record time go? You don't have the answer, you can't be bothered to dive beneath the layer of superfluous thoughts and search the archives of your subconscious for the answer buried deep within. So you ignore the uncomfortable feeling – it’s all too easy to forget it. All you gotta do is open another app and see what other people are thinking.
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