How to maximize screen time
There is no reason to participate in the real world. As everyone should, you want to spend time with your screens exclusively. But — as it is with anything good — staying on your screen constantly requires hard work. This 5 step guide will help you.
1. Avoid the outside at all cost
We have to start with the fundamentals. Don’t go outside. Nothing makes it harder to stay on your screen than the outside world. Sunlight, sights and people, all these things just have one intention: to steal your time. Instead — stay at home. From the familiarity of your own bed, you can enjoy all that your phone, tablet, pc, and console has to offer.
Sadly, we are all just humans, and there are still lesser cravings we have to satisfy. Fortunately though, modern life has made it very easy for us to serve our needs from home.
First, if you’re not doing this already, start getting your errands exclusively online.
Should you feel lonely, sign up for as many social networks and dating sites as you can find. Monitor new trends closely and be the first on any new social platform. Look out for those that start trendy but vanish after a few months. This will prevent you from actually meeting real people on them, which, of course, only want to get you out of your bed. Collect fake friends exclusively. They will make you feel loved and important while never actually pestering you with requests for real-life encounters.
There is even a way to cover your sexual needs from home (for free). To do so, it is important to have a vast knowledge of the pornographic material available online. Which I’m sure, you already have. This will be the easiest part of all of it, I promise. We live in the golden age of porn. Every fetish you can possibly imagine is available online. You only need to indulge compulsively. To lose all drive to date and meet real people you only need to up your doses. Why go outside and meet real people? They won’t be as good looking and kinky as in those videos anyway.
2. Avoid any social interaction
While #1 is an admirable goal, it is also almost impossible to achieve at all times. Even when taking meticulous care, sometimes we need to leave our homes. Be it for work, which is necessary to pay for our screens and flats, or other important obligations that are required to maintain our screen bound life. Being outside then is dangerous, there are many distractions that want to lure us away from our screens. The worst of them are social interactions. They may start harmless, but beware, a bit of small talk can easily lead to an insightful conversation which will distract you for hours. Even worse, you might even want to meet the person again! But let’s not imagine the worst. Because, thankfully, modern smartphones provide plenty of tools to prevent that from happening. These days we can watch offline movies, collect and grow farm animals and scroll through endless social network feeds (in which you should all be signed up for) on the go. So avoid looking at people and put your giant headphones on. Anything else would just encourage them. Just try to never really stay in the moment, be somewhere else, preferably, on your screen.
Even then, after taking all these safety measures, you might end up in a good conversation still. There are only a few things that can help you now, and thanks to this guide, you will be prepared. Your rescue comes in the form of push notifications. There is nothing more effective in getting you back to your phone. The lovely familiar vibration, the tingling of an old, momentarily forgotten friend. You will be back at it in no time. The best thing is, this is also socially unacceptable. You will anger your conversational friend, in the best case, making them stop to pursue any further social interaction with you. To make this most effective, give all of your apps the rights to message you.
3. Let FoMO guide you
Boredom could lead to movement, it could make you go outside and do things, maybe, even talk to people. This would undermine everything we have worked for so far. Luckily, here, we have allies unknown. Companies like Facebook and Snapchat put the brightest minds to work on how to get us glued to our screens. They want us to spend as much time in their app as possible. The only thing we have to do is to indulge. Spend meticulous time on perfecting your social profile and follow as many accounts as possible.
But be careful, this can go both ways. Apps like Instagram may propel you to actually go outside. So avoid accounts of friends and of real people in general. Stay focused on the accounts that keep you coming back for unrealistically perfect content. Be it the travel blog that runs images of expensive travel locations through 10 filters before posting it, or the fashion blogger that takes 100 pictures of themselves before being satisfied enough with one to post it (after, also running it through 10 filters of course). Look out for the accounts that make you feel worse about yourself without actually motivating you to change anything about it. It’s the „Yes that’s amazing, but I could never afford/do/look like that“ that you’re looking for.
4. Read the news while doing nothing
While FoMo is an amazing psychological mechanism that we can employ, it has its limits. Yes, the addictiveness of a social network app is finite. But, don’t fear, there are other means to keep you glued. And because fortune is on our side, the current media landscape provides distractions in mass. Once your social feeds are exhausted, visit any online publication and use it to feed your anger and outrage.
You will find more than enough topics you can read that will make you scratch your head and question the goodness of humanity in general (which you should, see #2). News organizations only publish the bad things that happen. And, the worse an article sounds, the more likely it’s to catch your eye. Publications optimize their writing not for informative value, but for clicks and time spent on their platform.
Sounds too good to be true? Well, it is. As always, the devil lies in the details. Choose your topics wisely. Focus on the stories that will outrage you, but which you have no control about. Avoid action at all cost. After reading about how bad climate change really is, you might feel propelled to adopt a more eco-friendly lifestyle, which, for example, would mean to stop ordering everything online (violating #1). Or even worse, start a local movement, leading to a never-ending stream of social interaction (violating #1 and #2). If you’re unable to avoid this feeling in the first place, only take action in meaningless ways. And — from home. Give a thumbs up or share a link on the many social networks you signed up for. Sharing your outrage with others, while doing nothing.
5. Sleep Badly
We, humans, are social animals by default, we seek other people and the outdoors (terrible!). But there are ways to fix us. Sleeping badly being the most effective. Nothing will keep you longer in your bed (see #1) than a horrible night’s sleep. Even the most outgoing person will turn into an unsocial zombie after some restless nights. And the best thing is, we can achieve this by staring at our screens. How convenient. It’s like everything’s coming together to our favor.
However, even here, society tries to falter our efforts. Make sure to turn off your screen dimming. These mechanisms of the devil are now turned on by default on many devices. Their only goal is to improve your sleep quality (which is bad) by dimming the display to a more friendly color. Instead, turn the brightness up to 11. The things we do on our screens are important, we can’t risk not seeing them in their full magnificence. Turn on a Netflix series on full brightness and you will be perfectly set up for a ruined night’s sleep. Netflix’s autoplay feature will further help you and is a gift for all of us that seek the real thing: maximizing screen time.
It is all so simple. Just follow these steps and you will finally spend your life in a meaningful way: on your screen. What else would you want to do with your time anyway?
Originally published at fabianstiehle.com.
