Campfires and Camping Nowadays

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Times sure have changed! Back when I was growing up if we went campingit would be a great adventureinto the unknown. We could run off and do all kinds of things like catch frogs or snakes, go hiking, swimming, skipping rocks, whittling sticks, rafting, fishing…the possibilities seemed endless. Of course, this was before the invention of smart phones and Facebook.

Go camping nowadays and we’re sure to see kids (and perhaps even their parents) glued to their electronic devices the whole time…taking selfies, playing apps, surfing the web, giggling at porn, updating, liking, tweeting, tagging…it continues endlessly until the battery dies. So much for the childhood memories of sitting around the fire and telling stories.

It’s times like these that we’ll miss once we get older, so we shouldn’t let them pass us by just because we’re updating our status or posting a #nofilter picture of the food we just ate. Yes, take photos. Take lots of photos! But there’s a place and time for gluing our faces to a screen and checking how many retweets we got in the past hour.

This doesn’t just happen while camping, it happens everywhere…during everything. It seems to be infecting our lives more than we realize; increasing with each year. We could be having a nice dinner with friends, in a new restaurant, but we’re more concerned with checking our Facebook and texting other friends. Everyone seems to have their phones out! In fact, I went out the other day for breakfast with my girlfriend and we noticed five different couples on their phones at the table. No joke!

Sure, I love to take pictures of my food, it helps me remember the nice meal. It’s a memory to look back on. But the minute we start uploading it to social media or texting it to friends we begin to disrespect everyone sitting at the table with us.

It seems, in a way, that social media is making us anti-social. We’re abusing this amazing technology and allowing it to take over more important moments of our lives. The saying “everything is good in moderation” holds true in this case. Don’t let these inventions suck away the things that are truly important in life, like spending quality time with friends and family, or creating a work of art.

My girlfriend told me the other day how she was really excited for movie night. It was a night to enjoy quality time with the children she was living with and her friend from work. She waited all week for it. Then when the time came, one kid was texting the whole time, and the other kid was on an iPad. They ruined the whole night! It’s called movie night for a reason people!

So, let’s take this perfect example and add some math to it. If the first iPhone came out in 2007, and the first iPad in 2010, then children who are  4-7 have had these devices around their whole life. This is starting the addiction and abuse early…far too early. Is addiction too harsh of a word? Well, what else should we call it? Just imagine trying to get their faces out of these devices in 5 more years with all of the new 2020 gadgets and hyper social sites. They will be spending their entire life glued to a monitor of some kind and missing the world around them.

What’s going on here?

A responsible adult with children will probably think twice about shoving their iPad in front of their kids’ face just to keep them quiet. Sure it can educate them in ways, but it’s so easy to let it consume their lives. We must be aware of how these things affect our lives so we can gain valuable time to create art or enjoy the physical world around us. Time is a precious commodity that we can’t afford to frivolously waste.

Let’s can simply reconnect with life by disconnecting devices.