We're all zombies (and not the cool kind)

I read a study today that said we will, on average, spend 3,188 hours starting at one kind of electrified screen or another such as television, computer, cell phone, GPS, computer games and other assorted shiny, attention grabbing things. We’ll also spend around 365 hours of commercial viewing per year through television alone. That’s on top of all the pop-up and on-site advertising on the Internet sites like Google and Facebook.

So is all this advertising turning us into mindless zombies? The fact is you’re taking in information when you watch television or surf the internet. Not that the information is, strictly speaking, of any importance, but our brains are still being engaged in a very basic way. So while you sit there and watch hour upon hour of Family Guy or playing Farmville you may feel like you’re filling in your time. And maybe you are, who am I to argue? But from the outside looking in, all you're doing is sitting in front of a screen, slack-jawed and dead-eyed.

But from where I’m sitting, it’s really rather depressing that so much of our lives is taken up by the most inane of activities when there are so many other things we could be doing. We are living in the most enlightened and progressive time this planet has ever known, a time where we can look, dress and behave however we like. We have access to public transport that can take us pretty much anywhere we want to go (if we can stand waiting around for 45 minutes for a train to arrive), not to mention cars.

So rather than take in what our surroundings have to offer, what do we do? We sit around and watch TV, or spend hours accomplishing nothing on the internet. And that’s only when we’re not working which takes up a much larger chunk of our lives than it rightfully should. And on weekends, in between our zombie-like intake of the media and our slavery to the wage; we drink, celebrating the fact that we have two nights of freedom from our own lives. Or we drink to ignore the fact that our freedom is so short-lived as to be laughable. Or we just sit at home, in front of our televisions and computers and waste our lives away on digital waves of light.

I think I’ll go and update my Facebook status now.