Why do we stare as much as we do? Any excuse for hypnosis will do. We’ve got the lowdown, screen time blues! It’s true. We’ve got the numbing, dumbing, screen time blues!
With the screen time blues, it actually feels hard to:
Blink.
Look away.
Close our eyes.
Grab our glasses.
Gaze fondly at loved ones.
The screen is sucking us in, demanding that we keep looking. The screen is begging us to return, to check the weather for the 8th time in an hour. Then it tempts us to scroll through rolls, as we feel increasingly mesmerized by the endlessness of the results. We lock the phone, then find our fingers opening it up again for no apparent reason. The smartphone makes us dumb.
Scrolling is our coping mechanism and our vice, which we must carefully manage. Staring at the screen is habitual, especially as we seek out things that do not ask much of us besides passive consumption. It’s the blues, baby!
Strangely, we feel urgent with screen time activities that are unrelated to the job hunt, whereas we might feel emotionally stale “merely” job hunting. Responsibly productive screen time is less stimulating compared to the drama and pizazz, the love and the tragedy, of internet pop-media.
Avoiding a job hunt task is easy to do when distractions induce positive feelings (temporary like a breath mint). Fact. The more we seek screens for instant gratification (bags upon bags of breath mints until we can’t taste anything else), the less satisfying it will feel returning to the screen for non-entertainment purposes (more akin to brushing our teeth).
Also, it’s downright scary to advance forward when we know unpleasant experiences are in store for us. Avoiding the hunt might mean avoiding the risk of failure and rejection, but it also means avoiding the success we find in persevering. We are rejected or we have to undergo the stress and scrutiny of a job interview. Either way, we just need to keep plodding along, plodding forward, keeping our goal in sight. Hunting takes patience, to be sure!
How can we make the job hunt feel more exciting? One way is to remove the competing factor.
After an in-depth job hunt session, we often seek out screen-featured ways to relax, which only furthers our physical and mental exhaustion. It’s crucial that we monitor how much time we spend on screens. Staying in one place puts a huge strain on our everything. We are creatures of movement and action. Zombification does not become us.
Decision time.
It’s been quite the week. Our eyes are fried. We can’t think. It’s hard to focus on anything else. We just want the satisfying screen glow to cook our retinas. So soothing. So familiar. So mindless.
We stop. We think. What are we consuming and why? Will it take away from the energy we could use toward our job hunt? Are we serving it or is it serving us? While screen time is necessary in this technological world, we master the hunt by prioritizing.
Instead of scrolling, we scare away our screen time blues by actually peeling away from the screen. We save our screen time for the job hunt (logging on to Callings.ai for example…).
Being productive with screen time, we can now use our offscreen time for fun and connection!
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