Subhechcha Ganguly Mahendra Singh Dhoni, often known as Captain Cool, eschewed carrying a phone for the majority of his time as captain and during his international cricketing career. Or, if he had a phone, few people knew it. In an interview with India Now, Ravi Shastri, who served as the Indian cricket team’s manager and head coach for a major portion of MS’s time as captain, said, “Till today, I don’t have his number. I never requested his phone number. I am aware that he does not go with a phone. You are aware of his contact information and how to reach him when you need to. He fits that description.
Now, I have occasionally envied MS throughout my life. For his helicopter shot when he was younger, and as I got older, for his cool demeanour. But I was astounded to read Shastri’s remarks about not being tethered to a phone. How had MS managed to avoid having technology, in this case a mobile phone, invade his mind?
Today, people use their mobile phones to make calls, respond to emails, view movies, check social media, do their online shopping, utilise messaging services like WhatsApp or Signal, and shoot images using the built-in camera. A regular sight in a fine restaurant is a couple having dinner with their faces buried in their phones. Or attorneys like myself rushing between the 16 Supreme Court courtrooms while checking our phones It’s like a fast-paced Olympic discipline for lawyers.
The virtual world is now so accessible and captivating thanks to technology that experts are now concerned about its addictive potential. According to Jessica Brown’s 2018 article for the BBC, 40% of the world’s population, or about 3 billion individuals, utilise online social media. Importantly, we “share, like, tweet, and update on platforms” for two hours on average per day. This equates to about 500,000 tweets and Snapchat photographs per minute. She claims that a study indicated that persons who reported using seven or more social media platforms were three times more likely to have greater levels of general anxiety symptoms than people who reported using 0 to 2 platforms. The study was published in the journal “Computers and Human Behaviour.”
But it’s not simply that the virtual world of technology consumes our daily hours. In ways that evolution never intended for our species, our nightly patterns are also being altered. People have evolved to time their sleep with darkness and their waking hours with sunlight. We need sleep if we want to live long and healthy lives.
More than 17,000 studies have been done, according to Matthew Walker, author of the incredibly well-researched book “Why We Sleep,” to show that getting enough sleep increases life expectancy and improves cognition, creativity, and resistance to cancer and dementia.
Sleep is the primary nourisher in life’s feast, as Shakespeare stated in Macbeth’s Act Two, Scene Two in 1611.
