Giving In

My home is about 40 minutes from my workplace, and I take the tram there and back every day. I usually spend that time entirely on my phone: answering messages that have piled up, making calls and, most of all, scrolling through social media (Instagram).

A few months ago I switched to a different mobile operator. And what did I find? Right in the middle of a major city, the new operator had no signal! I remember spending that whole 40-minute ride trying to reach a customer service representative to fix the problem, feeling tense and restless the entire way… On the way home from work, since I still had no internet, I started looking at my surroundings and the people around me instead. I (really) saw so many people: someone quietly listening to music through their headphones, someone chatting with the person next to them, people who looked tired, people who looked cheerful… Of course, most of them were passing the time with their phones in hand, just as I always did.

That day I realised how long and how full that 40-minute journey actually was. I had even started to enjoy not having internet when I was out! There was Wi-Fi at home and at the office anyway, and I handled everything important there. The only thing missing from my life was the time I spent on Instagram. I even added reading to that time. I noticed that the journey was becoming far more productive for me. Those moments had become moments of awareness. But one day I urgently needed to do a bank transaction. That time, not having internet really put me in a difficult spot… After that, I stopped by one of the operator's sales centres. It turned out that 4.5G simply needed to be switched on in the phone's settings. They switched it on, and my internet was back to normal…

And within days, unfortunately, I slipped back into my old phone habits on the journey… But I'm more aware now. I no longer let myself drift along, surrendered to it, the way I used to.