Power Buttons

Dear Reader,

I had a wonderful moment today which prompted me to write this, admittedly odd, article.

We constantly talk about how, as human beings in a digital age, we’re addicted to our phones, our computers, and the internet. And I have to admit, I’m addicted too. It’s worse off for digital natives like myself, who’ve never experienced a world without fancy rectangles and blocks that crunch through numbers so fast you can't even blink, a world where every sound, every picture, meme, video, text, even experience are perfectly replicated in any displayable and interactable format to you. Anyone who's interacted with short videos or any form of instant satisfaction should instantly recognize the issue here: We’ve normalized addiction and we can't go back.

It’s not hard to realize human attention and stimulation are under siege and have been for long enough that we’ve grown numb.

But don’t we have a power button?

Ah, finally, the title of this article, so odd and mystery-inducing. Power buttons.

We put power buttons, on and off switches, and unpluggable cords everywhere, it’s how you turn your phone off, it's how you turn your computer off, it gives our biological and independent selves a way to turn something off, right? We built these things, and we built a way to turn them off, so why don't we?

Never in human history has solving a problem been as easy as putting your finger on a button and turning it off. We are not at war with computers, we are at war with ourselves because we don't turn it off. In fact, we keep them on so when we wake up we have instant stimulation before we even take care of ourselves, we keep them on so at night before bed we can doom scroll Instagram reels until 12, it’s not the computer that's ruining us, it's ourselves.

But, along with that reality, there's a beauty in turning your electronics off.

There’s the tactile aspect, you put your finger on a physical switch, then push it with a certain force and it simply buckles under you. Theres no resistance past that, everything turns off.

Then there’s the metaphorical aspect of turning your electronics off, in a way you’ve just killed the computer. It doesn’t function anymore, at least until you press the button again and revive it. You’ve turned into an almost divine entity towards the computer, you can turn it off and revive it whenever you like. And if the power button doesn't work, there's always a power cord to unplug.

What if we just took a step back and looked at these electronics as both friend and foe and picked for ourselves which foe to turn off and which friend to connect? What if instead of doom scrolling, you turned your phone off and took some notes on yourself? But of course, electronics can be your friend, when they help you be more productive, be more focused, that's when you turn them back on.

But at the end of the day, you are the one in control of the power button. You hold the everlasting power of turning something on and off based on your whim. So take away this weird little read as a piece of self-reflection. Do you know when to turn something off?

Best,

The Author.