Why our screens make us less happy

Adam Alter began his TED talk with how Steve Jobs limits technology and screen time with his kids.

This made him think about what screens were doing to people.

He collected on data how much time we were spending time with our technologies. The time we spend per day with them were increasing year by year.

The weird thing is that we were actually spending more time with apps that doesn’t make us happy.

Why is that happening?

Adam Alter said that it was because there were no “stopping cues”. Back when I was much younger, in primary school, I used to watch dramas on TV. There is no such thing as binge-watching, I had to wait till the next day/week to watch the next episode. That was my stopping cue, a sign for me to go and do something else, something new.

But with the way we consume media nowadays, there is always new content rolling in from different apps. There is no stopping because we are so connected with each other. Stopping cues are non-existent, there is nothing to stop us from looking at our screens and move on to do something else.

We need to break away from technology once in awhile. We need to breathe.

Being disconnected and giving ourselves some real alone time is a very important and healthy thing to do.