It doesn’t matter if they’re Gen Alpha (those born since 2010) or Millennials (1981-1996), most people under the age of 40 have grown up with technology a big part of their lives. Whether with a computer or smartphone, their entire lives have been shaped by instant access to information, entertainment, retail therapy and communication.
People of an older vintage are often just as reliant on the internet and the ease with which modern technology allows them to live their lives. However, they will remember a time when the phone was connected to the wall by a wire, the TV had only two channels and music was only accessible in certain rooms of the house where a record or cassette player was in situ.
But today, 90 per cent of Irish adults have a smartphone and most of us couldn’t imagine life without it.
However, there are some who, although they do use a mobile phone, prefer to live a simpler life not so reliant on technology.
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Eva Naughton is one such person. She decided, “after years of being hooked on tech”, that she had had enough. Naughton now does all she can to keep digital usage to an absolute minimum. “I, like most of my friends, grew up with technology being part of my life,” she says. “When I was a kid, my parents tried to keep my internet and computer time to a minimum, but I loved playing video games and was so desperate to have a phone, that I pestered them incessantly until they finally gave in when I was 11.
“The joy of having my own device was immense, and although my time on it was limited and there were parental controls, it didn’t take long for me to work my way around it as I was more savvy than my parents. Then, as I went into my teens and older, I got really into social media and would be forever taking and posting photos, scrolling through other people’s profiles and generally living my life in a virtual world.”
But, along with the fun, which goes hand in hand with digital connectivity, the now 24-year-old says she began to experience the darker side of technical development. “I was a fairly quiet child at school and wasn’t really part of the ‘cool’ gang of girls who really ruled the roost. There was the usual petty bitchiness in primary school, which was fairly harmless, but it wasn’t until I got into secondary school that things changed and, when I was about 15, my friend and I became the focus of an awful lot of bullying from the same girls who had been somewhat mean to us when we were younger.
“Our clothes, hair, size and pretty much everything else about us was up for ridicule, and it made going to school really hard. I didn’t want to tell my parents, as I was terrified that it would make things worse. So I just put up with it and would spend the day waiting to go home. Ignoring the whispers and sniggers was the only way I could deal with it. But I suppose they thought they weren’t getting through to me, so the next thing was taking it online. They started a rumour with, ‘not sure if it’s true but’, and before long, everyone was saying that my friend and I were gay and that we were involved in all sorts of things, including offering our services for money.
“The bullying became awful, and I found it really difficult to deal with, as it was relentless, both at school and at home, and not only from people I knew. Eventually, I told my parents and begged them not to make a big deal about it, but to move me from the school, which is what happened. That finally was the end of it, as I got a new phone number, so they couldn’t contact me.”
Since this traumatic experience, she has been very wary of social media, only using it for private group chats with her new friends. This helped her to “avoid becoming addicted to it” and now, unlike most of her peers, has almost no interaction online at all. “After a year of horrendous bullying and then moving schools, I was terrified of it happening again, so I stayed off all social media, apart from WhatsApp.
My focus is trying to be present in my life, being in the moment and being properly in the places or with the people I am with
“Facebook at the time was the worst so I never went back to that. I had Instagram and TikTok for a while in college, and it wasn’t long before I became somewhat obsessed and was watching mindless videos, most of which were fake, instead of doing something else. I also realised that watching all the supposedly amazing lives people were living was making me feel depressed, so I decided to uninstall them.
“Now I keep WhatsApp for communicating with family and friends, but other than that, I avoid it like the plague. I love reading actual books, so would prefer to spend my time curled up with a book rather than my phone. I am also into art and music and like running and swimming, so I keep myself busy. It might sound like I’m a bit of a loner because I’m doing something different to the norm, but I have a great social life. And even though my friends used to slag me off about my ‘weirdness’ about technology, some of them are starting to spend less time looking at their screens as well.
“It has become something of an unwritten rule between them that no one sits scrolling their phone when they are out with me, and they have said that it’s much more fun as everyone is ‘present’. Also, a couple of them have developed my love of real books rather than e-readers and have become hooked.”
Trisha Norton can relate to this as she barely tolerates technology and only uses it for work. She has no smart appliances in her home and, although she does have a smartphone, keeps usage to a minimum and ensures that she never uses it in the evening. “I am barely on social media and even then, only for my business (checking in once a day) as I am not inclined to share my personal life publicly,” she says.
“The many applications, notifications, TV shows and new devices all compete for our attention, and this pull draws us to outside sources – yet we wonder why we are the most anxious, depressed, medicated and unsatisfied generation to exist in a time where (primarily) we have a great deal more safety than ever seen before. There are many complex factors which are contributing to this, but, what I have found is that the more present I can be with myself and what is organically happening in my body, the more at peace I can feel.
“This is not to say that I feel happy or joyous all the time – it is the opposite. But it means that I can be present with the anger, fear and sadness, and have the tools to move that emotion (aka – energy-in-motion) through the body and return to a state of ease.
“So my focus is trying to be present in my life, being in the moment and being properly in the places or with the people I am with. This means I know I am living, not just skimming the surface or constructing life for other people. To deeply be present and experience life is what is most important – we are only fleeting images in the majority of people’s lives through social media, so I do not intend to sacrifice what is real for something fake.”
The 35-year-old wellness facilitator says that although she acknowledges that technology is important, too much of it can damage our health. “While we can have apps which tell us our sleep patterns, heart rates and stress levels, no app can ever reach inside of us and really meet that younger, or inner child, part of us which feels threatened or overwhelmed in any one moment.
“I do believe that tech can be our ally, but only if we have developed a strength of conscious awareness and a compassionate inner voice which knows how to use it discerningly.”
Naughton agrees, and says she is seeing a greater interest from her friends in switching off and enjoying life. “Last year, I suggested to my friends that we do a tech-free weekend every couple of months, and what started out as just three of us, has grown into a bigger group. Sometimes, we hire a house and do activities like hiking, kayaking and board games and it will always involve cooking nice food and drinking wine – other times we’ll just arrange to meet up and do stuff in the real world.
“I don’t understand why more people don’t do the same – life is for living in the real world.”
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