ABSOLUTE ASCENDANCY

Commencing operation . . .

Overview

Next time you’re out and about, walking down the street or waiting at a bus stop, look around you and see how many people are glued to their smartphone screens. It is staggering to the point of utter madness, the number of people who spend excessive amounts of time browsing their phones, to no meaningful end.

Once Upon a Time

The initial concept of creating the mobile phone was brilliant. The technology provided a convenient means for people to communicate while they were away from home. Back in the day, well before the advent of mobile technology, people had no way of contacting anyone beyond their immediate vicinity while they were out and about, barring a well-placed telephone box. If you were out at night, needed to contact someone and there weren’t any telephone booths around, you were pretty stuffed. Local shops and offices would have long since closed, and you would pretty much have no choice but to either wait until you got back home or find the nearest property and hope the owners allowed you to use their telephone.

Unfortunately, though, as time has passed, the smartphone has become a significant problem for society at large. The blame mostly boils down to the creation of the smartphone, the successor of the mobile phone. The original mobile phone was fine; all you could do with it was call or text people. There may have been some functionality to play basic games or listen to some music, but that was more or less it.

Present Day Crisis

Smartphones however, are pretty much a pocket computer. Given the myriad of apps around, the smartphone can carry out the majority of tasks that a desktop computer or a laptop could do. As a stand-alone fact, this is not an issue; the proposition is actually pretty fantastic. The real problem is that the majority of humanity, who possess a smartphone, end up becoming engrossed and enslaved by their technology for near enough every moment of their waking lives. This is no mere exaggeration either. I have personally witnessed this on numerous occasions during my ventures, people who are almost always on their phones. I was with a friend once, and he mentioned how he wished he could stay away from his phone more often.

The root cause of this addiction is the devastating combination of the smartphone coupled with social media and gaming apps. Having the ability to access social media platforms and play mobile games at will, at any time or place is like having an instant dopamine booster button on demand. This has created a paradigm shift within the younger generations, these so-called Millennials, whereby they end up believing through always using their smartphones that they can order in their happiness instantly without having to work for it. When the reality is that such satisfaction is very much short lived. This creates a destructive, vicious cycle where the smartphone user constantly uses their smartphone in a desperate, feeble attempt to maintain their dopamine high, only to inevitably crash and burn in the flames of sorrow.

Only through constructive effort towards a meaningful end, is happiness sustained.

There is no other way. I believe it is the responsibility of parents/guardians to heavily restrict and modulate the frequency that their dependants use such technologies, to help reduce the amount of smartphone addiction within this world. When I was growing up, my parents enforced a rule where my brother and I could only play video games from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening. It wasn’t great at the time, especially since everyone else I knew was not under such restraint, but looking back I am thankful that they put such controls in place. It taught me from a young age that rewards had to be worked towards (slugging through the week of school to then play video games during the weekend) and not to take such things for granted. I had to earn my right to play video games and subsequently enjoy the dopamine boost it gave me.

There is even a phenomenon mainly known within the world of chiropractic as ‘text neck’ a term used to describe those with necks that have grown too far forward from the rest of the body, due to frequently looking down or leaning forward. There has been an alarming rise of this condition since the release of smartphone technology, and studies have shown a direct link between the two.

Are smartphones and mobile apps all bad?

No.

Inherently there is nothing wrong with either of them. It is the overuse and misuse of these technologies that is the problem. There are some great apps out there for all sorts of purposes, a couple of examples include satellite navigation and language translators though there are many more.

My Relation with Smartphones

I only use my mobile phone for communicating with others and have recently cut back on my mobile plan to limit the use of mobile data severely. I have mobile data on my phone switched off actually since I can always wait until I get back home to check for any new E-mails and so forth.  I am now on a simple pay as you go SIM card and do not involve myself with any monthly bundle packages. This means I load money onto the phone, and whenever I end up running out of credit, I renew it.

If I could, I would honestly make Absolute Ascendancy mobile unfriendly. A poor business strategy perhaps, if the site could have been inaccessible or virtually unreadable when viewed via a mobile device, which would also hurt the search engine optimisation rankings for my site. It would have been my preference, though, to stand by my convictions against smartphones. I do not want anyone viewing my website while they out and about. It is my wish for people to spend that time focussed on interacting with the surrounding world, living life, and use only dedicated ‘computer time’ for browsing Absolute Ascendancy. 

Conclusion

Stop wasting your limited time on your smartphone to fill in whatever void or inadequacies you have and start applying yourself in meaningful, practical ways to nurture your gifts and realise your potential.

Mission complete – Overlord Drakow signing out.