After a decade of cruising through the smartphone craze, it is time to start thinking toward the basic phone, popularly known as kabambe in Kenya.
The smartphone has become like out fifth limb, our second world and it’s time we cut off this attachment. Here are top five reasons.
Starve yourself off notifications
Notifications are irritating and distracting – heads-up, stop right on your tracks and look at this. That buzz from a phone nudge us to take involuntary break from the routine. Almost always, they are nags from social media, email, SMS, or even the system itself, completely uncalled-for. These alerts are designed to wander your attention around social media, email, and other internet applications.
Today, our attention spans could be a fraction of our ancestors and they continue to dwindle. Researchers at the University of California Irvine have found out that it could take between 15 -23 minutes to refocus after a distraction. Often, the best way to deal with them is to block them but then there is the fear of missing out. So, ditch the smartphone altogether. A compromise would be dedicating some time in a day, outside the smartphone. That’s where kabambe comes handy.
Shorter screen times
Look at your average screen time – the standard is usually 8 hours sleeping, another 8 working, and the remainder 8 reading. The smartphone has crossed these boundaries. It has taken our bedtime, read time, and working time. Activities of daily living like hygiene and exercise have become luxuries. A little IG, some TikTok here and there, long-distance scrolling on Twitter feeds, and before you know it, the stubborn reality of spending upward of one third of a lifetime on the screen.
Mental health and digital wellbeing
Our Mental health is at stake with smartphones taking over our world. Social media and internet by design is hyper-addictive. The content is personalized and attuned to our preferences through machine learning. Thus, it affects our psyche by triggering dopamine, a neurotransmitter concerned with pleasure and making us feel rewarded. That way, we get hooked up and keep begging for more. It becomes mentally taxing since addiction have to seek this cheap dopamine, getting sated but only in the short term. Rinse and Repeat. Our brains are overburdened with all clutter from social media making us feel exhausted and mentally foggy. Again, the cyberspace can be toxic, chaotic, full of trolls and bullies who will often tear your ego. With this, the kabambe becomes part of the post-screen clarity and better wellbeing.
Social skills
Humans are social and wired to fulfil our primal instincts. With the smartphone, that is not the case. Humans have lost a touch from reality. It is hard to sustain out social relationships or even build new ones since all time is spent on the phone. How many times have you talked to a someone on the work commute? Smartphone addiction means that we are reclused from the meaningful and real world, spending most of our time in these virtual spaces.
Posture and physique
When did you lastly look at someone in the eye or walk chin up on the street? Smartphones turned us have become hunchbacks. We always slouched to the screen, facing downwards as if we carry a ton of guilt. Slowly we are evolving into zombies transfixed on our mobile phones just out of touch with our worlds.
The functional phone is going mainstream and the reason is to restore sanity in the world. Although it’s hard to quit a smartphone cold turkey, start by dedicating a portion of your day to without your dear smartphone. After sometime, you will wean yourself off the smart phone. Put simply, you are free. Smartphone? No thank you. kabambe, yes please.
