CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
A local 20-something has this week realised that she actually feels much better when she isn’t spending the best part of each day mainlining all of the information in the entire world through a bright screen 10 centimetres from her eyeballs.
It’s a weird outcome that follows and even weirder decision, as Eleanor Pasin (24) decided to simply stop staring at an iPhone screen for 7 hours a day.
She’s also opted out of the six different social media platforms that were pillaging her nervous system with escalating algorithms that prioritised short-form videos of highly inflammatory political content and extremely graphic acts of violence – rather than the cute photos of pets and sunsets that she had initially signed up for.
No amount of wellness apps, diets or meditation techniques have been able to quell the impending feeling of doom that has rattled Eleanor’s mind and soul for the last 14 years.
The ice baths and saunas only drowned out the incessant noise for an hour or so, and she wasn’t really that keen to go further down the rabbit hole and begin micro-dosing hard drugs in her effort to find calm.
Since replacing her smartphone with an old-fashioned Nokia 3310, Eleanor says she’s surprised by the significant improvements to her mental health. She also says she’s shocked by the fact that she doesn’t miss the online gossip and culture wars she was once force-fed against her will at all hours of the day.
This comes after more than a decade of searching for an inner-peace that she has not been able to attain ever since her parents gifted her with an iPhone 4S in 2011 because they were worried about her getting kidnapped by Al-Qaeda in the 3 minutes between her leaving the school gate and getting picked up in the family car at 3:13pm as a teenager.
Her friends and family say they were initially worried about Eleanor’s drastic and unhinged decision to break the social contract that saw her mood and emotions solely dictated by the business models of foreign-owned tech giants.
Many thought she might turn into a completely unemployable and socially isolated luddite.
However, these very real concerns were eventually put to bed when Eleanor revealed she is still easily contacted via a ‘phone call’ or ‘text message’ – two forms of communication that literally every smartphone in the world is still capable of.
She now gets her news from from print media and desktop websites. Sometimes she even turns on the TV and watches light-hearted sitcoms for an hour or so before going to bed with a nice book.
