Are you available?
Of course, darling. For your boss, your WhatsApp groups, your smartwatch that vibrates because you haven’t “breathed correctly” in the last 3 minutes.
You’re online. All the time. And that should feel… good, right?
But it doesn’t.
What you feel is somewhere between HD anxiety and a kind of mental fog that not even the latest update can clear.
You get 300 notifications a day, but struggle to hold a face-to-face conversation without checking your phone three times.
You know what some influencer had for breakfast in Bali (or well, what they claim to be Bali), but you can’t remember the last time you had breakfast without staring at a screen.
You’re hyperconnected… and at the same time, disconnected from yourself, from others, from unfiltered reality.
That’s where the paradox lives.
On a planet full of signals, the hardest thing to find is silence.
Connected? Sure. Emotionally connected? Eh… not so much.
We’ve confused being connected with feeling connected.
And one doesn’t guarantee the other.
You can get hearts, virtual applause, messages with emojis laughing and crying at once… and still feel like a forgotten tab in someone’s browser.
Lots of “love this ❤️”, but very little “how are you really?”
Technology doesn’t isolate us on its own.
We isolate ourselves when we use it as a shield instead of a bridge.
What does science say?
Recent studies back it up:
Excessive digital connection is linked to rising social anxiety.
Constant multitasking messes with your working memory and focus.
And doomscrolling (that endless stream of news or drama) disrupts sleep cycles.
It’s not just a feeling.
It’s your nervous system saying, “can we please slow down?”
Our brain needs pauses, stillness, deep relationships.
Our mind was designed to connect with others… not to process 74 stimuli per minute.
It’s not about turning it all off. It’s about turning yourself on.
It’s about using technology without letting it use you.
Small digital acts of rebellion:
— Mute notifications that add nothing.
— Put your phone down when someone’s speaking (even if it’s you).
— Get used to staring out the window, not just the screen (okay, unless there’s a concrete wall in front of you).
— Relearn how to be bored without opening an app for rescue.
Reclaiming your attention is the new luxury.
Presence is the new superpower.
Because being online means nothing if it disconnects you from who you are.
Online, but Distant
That’s the paradox. We’ve never been so available. And never been so hard to reach.
We thought tech would bring us closer—but we mistook bandwidth for depth.
And so, between likes, alerts, and video calls, the thing we lost the most…
was the silence we need to truly hear ourselves.
FAQs
Well, if your finger has more muscle memory for swiping through TikTok than your brain has for remembering your shopping list, maybe it does. The problem isn't use, it's overuse. Constantly checking your phone fragments your attention and, in the process, leaves you exhausted without getting anything done.
The irony is that, by not wanting to miss anything, you are missing everything: the present, a real conversation, a sunset, or at least the pleasure of eating a sandwich without interruptions (in my case, impossible, also with my cat, haha).
You could regain control of your time. And that can be… addictive.
