Without

This is very much a work in progress. If I could get suggestions on organization, focus, and things to add that would be great.

    

Much of my free time these days is used on various electronics, whether it’s my laptop, phone, or desktop computer at home. Whenever I’m bored, I’ll just turn one of them on and watch YouTube, play games, or just browse the web. While this does take up a lot of my time, I could certainly live without it, and I know that it would improve my life too.

    Back when I was younger, browsing the web or were very fun to me. I was first exposed to the internet through school computer games time back in kindergarten or first grade. The two websites or games that I remember the most are “Funbrain” and “Poptropica”. Us grade-schoolers had a very limited amount of time to play them during these school periods, so it made those short periods all that more important. Back at home, it was the same. My mom was quite strict on my internet habits in grade school, and she would give me around thirty minutes maximum on weekdays to use her computer. While I may not have liked this at the time, it was beneficial to me in many ways. Because I had a limited amount of time, all that time was used on things I really wanted to do- I remember thinking of the stuff I wanted to do in Poptropica, or websites I had to check before getting on the computer. This limited time made every moment on the computer meaningful. The same applied to smartphones. I remember my friends and I being addicted to certain mobile games, and we would always have a blast competing against each other in the little time out parents permitted us to play.

    In the present, this isn’t the case at all. I’m given a lot more time nowadays, especially since I have my own personal computer for “school”. So, instead of browsing the internet for only thirty minutes a day, I’ll do it whenever I’m bored or have nothing to do. Because of this, I’m never excited to go home and check a certain website. Previously, I had dreamed of having more than thirty minutes of free time on a computer. But when that happened, the activity had become boring itself. It’s the same for my phone. While getting on my mom’s phone and playing a simple game used to be very fun, I find doing that to be beyond boring now.

            Reflecting on my middle and grade school years, the few free hours I         had after dinner were far more productive than they are now. From grades one to four, I was obsessed with the “accelerated reader” program at my school. Basically, you earned “points” for reading books and taking a short multiple-choice test on them online. I was extremely over-competitive about this, and so every single one of my nights were dedicated to reading, usually from around 7-11 PM. Even though it may sound very boring or repetitive, and (maybe I’m wrong here) the common belief in society is that reading for fun is lame, I think I genuinely enjoyed sitting in my bed and reading four hours straight every night instead of wasting time on the computer or smartphones. During the past summer, I found myself turning off my phone and reading a book a few times just out of boredom. However, if I were to have all my technology taken away today forever, I doubt I would become as avid a reader again. Despite this, I do believe that I would find something more interesting to do than what I’m doing now, and getting rid of technology would make my life better overall.