National unplugged day: did you last?

Can you recall the last time you went 24-hours without watching TV, surfing the web, or playing mind-numbing games on your ironically named ‘smart’phone? No? That’s OK. Most people can’t.

Friday was National Unplugged Day, a movement started by the Sabbath Manifesto encouraging people to look up from their screens and embrace life. Again, it’s OK if you weren't one of the thousands who took the pledge to unplug their favorite electronics. People have jobs, responsibilities, bills to pay, etc. We live in a screen-oriented world.

Nowadays, going a full day without looking at some sort of screen seems barbaric. “Leave my home without my cell phone? But what if something bad happens?” Isn’t that always the first excuse we jump to? As technology has advanced, we’ve figured out ways to better integrate it into our daily routines. However, it has reached a point where technology and the individual may be too intertwined. It’s become a pseudo-parasitic relationship, where we feel we NEED our phones, our laptops, our TVs because without them — would we still exist? Without feedback from another person, without that link to the outside world, without that constant stimulation, the greatest fear is that we’ll be too easily forgotten. We’ll disappear, in a sense; chalked up as ‘just another smudge’ on the blackboard before being erased.

But we don’t have to have this addictive relationship with technology. Like all good things in life, it’s a matter of moderation. We need to look at devices like our smartphone, not as vestigial appendage, but as the tool it is.

On the official Unplugged website, people posted some of the things they planned to do while on this 24-hour tech fast. Most were family activities. Others were more ‘me-time’ oriented like reading, writing and long walks. (Starting to sound like an online dating profile) Don’t these activities sound a lot more enticing than mindlessly shopping for things you don’t need on Amazon, or stalking one of your friend’s Facebook profiles for pictures of them with an old fling you used to date?

If you weren’t able to take part in National Unplugged Day this year, I urge you to take the pledge in 2014. Remember — today’s technology is an amazing gift left by generations of inventors that struggled and sacrificed. Let’s never take that for granted.