00:00Yeah, actually I find it fascinating to log out, it's difficult to log in because of the codes and everything, yeah, it's impossible.
00:06The other thing I find it fascinating, you look at language, you know, we refer to the world online and the worst offline is the physical world, right?
00:15What took the universe 4.6 billion years to create physical reality, now is the other, it is the other, the truth is online and yeah, the exception is offline, you know, you have to go offline.
00:28I mean, I just find it fascinating that we do that.
00:30And offline is also considered some kind of a spiritual retreat, like offline, you know, it's changed and there is also smugness of that quitter who quit internet for 10 days and becomes so smug, I'm the quitter and I'm above you.
00:44Yeah, is it at all possible to log out without being smug?
00:50Without being smug about it, I mean touching grass is a thing I think all of us have heard that it's very fashionable to say that I'm going to log off and touch grass.
00:59I think a lot of, especially younger people are almost taking it like a trend, it's a good thing that they're trying but I feel like when digitality is still the center of your life,
01:10jabhi you're locked out hote, you're still thinking, oh look at me, I'm not on my phone, you know, I'll go back and post a story that my screen time was only one hour today.
01:17I think that smugness still exists which means even if you're not online, you're thinking of online and your reality online, a better way I would say to go about it is, and it's not advice but it's something that works for me,
01:33is to just find pockets of reality where you don't lose, you know, with someone you love, having intelligent conversations with friends, having fun listening to other people.
01:42Those pockets of time where you forget your phones and the internet exist at all, I feel like that is the real touching grass versus effort to be like, oh today I will, you know, be offline and like try to do it and I, I, that's my personal viewpoint on that.
01:56And that should we try resisting the attention, only smugness to this?
01:59I mean there are two ways, one way we can do it and one way we can limit our screen time and there are many apps like Opel is there, there are many apps to lock your screen time and lock many apps,
02:10so that is there but I think in the contemporary way it's become very difficult to resist that and there are many people who say that online mat raho, offline dekho, dunya baus sundar hai, offline dekho but offline kya dekha hai dhili mein, pollution hai jara, there's nothing to see.
02:25So I prefer, you know, looking on, inwards which I call online.
02:31So we embrace and we sort of drop this binary of IRL and online.
02:35But, but, but the attention thing is a very serious thing at the moment and I think many people are also realising it, so that's why that this new discourse that has happened that phone is the new smoking, the screen is the new smoking, so that discourse is there and now many people are realising it, how to, you know, detox themselves maybe.
02:54So should we be thinking and talking actively about looking for tools to resist this assault on our attention economy and what's happened to it?
03:02Yeah, I mean, I can, I think we can look for the tools but I am pessimistic about chance of success because, you know, we've done some work recently with Gen Alpha which is the emerging generation and, and, you know, you find that there is a lot of consciousness parents have about the fact that, you know, this is not, you know, screen time needs to be limited, etc. for children.
03:20But frankly, their policing efforts are very, very lame and very half-hearted because at one level they recognise the fact that, you know, you have to be connected.
03:29If you want to be successful in today's world, you cannot be offline.
03:32You know, you, and so there is this sense but I don't know how to navigate it, I don't know what, you know, guardrails to put and therefore it is all too much.
03:41You know, the idea, how do you navigate something, you know, and how do you control something when that device is with you all the time, right, where all your functions are carried out through that device.
03:51You pay through your device, you connect through your device, you, so it's, it's easier said than done, you know, it's very easy to say this.
03:57All of the things out of the phone as well.
03:58Yeah, but I am just saying, how do you, how do you actually, in a, in a material setting with AI, you will be doing your homework with it, you will be doing, I mean, so, I'm, I'm not very optimistic about, I mean, I understand that we, it's like the air we breathe, right.
04:13It's like pollution, there's nothing we can do about it, right, we can, we can, we can just lock ourselves up and then we can use quasi purifiers like the apps that Alorak talks about.
04:22But beyond that, I'm, I'm a little pessimistic that we can.
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