I realised something a while back. For an extended amount of time everyday, I am staring at a screen. When I say “extended amount of time” I am referring to most of the day and when I say “everyday” I mean EVERYDAY! This might not sound like a big deal to most but the more I think about it, it’s actually quite shocking.
When I was younger I remember I had a comic book and inside the comic book was an advert for some 8bit Nintendo video game. Can’t remember now which game it was, but the theme of the advert was that you will be playing this game so much that you will get square eyes. I was young at the time and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it meant. My parents told me to watch out because if I played too many games for too long then I would get these “square eyes” that the advert mentioned! I would still enjoy playing games but I would try and not play for too long…I didn’t want my eyes to go square!
Back to the present day…
I work in the IT field which means all day I am pretty much looking at some kind of screen. I wake up in the morning, get showered, have breakfast and then I’m off to work where I stare at a HP notebook screen for the day. When I’m away from my desk I find myself looking at my Blackberry screen for whatever reason. I can already feel my eyes are changing shape…
When work ends for the day, I am away from a screen for maybe 1-2 hours. During this time span, the usual routine is to make and eat supper and then go to the gym (sometimes it’s gym and then supper, depends).
Post gym, I will usually make my way to the lounge where I will watch TV on a big HDTV screen for a couple hours. Oh, and did I forget to mention I am usually armed with either my tablet or the previously mentioned notebook! Bring on the square eyes again…
The point I am trying to make here is that wherever we look, there is some kind of screen for us to look at and marvel over. These days you can do pretty much everything with a cellphone, tablet etc…heck, some of the new HDTV’s even allow you to surf the web! I don’t even want to get started on 3D TV!
It makes me think back to that advert in the comic book. I now truly understand what they meant when they mentioned square eyes…
I am going to challenge myself once in a while and try to stay away from a screen for a day if possible. It can’t be too difficult to achieve, there is a big beautiful world out there full of things to see…without making your eyes change shape.
