If someone asks you if you are an addict, please say yes!

The word, addiction, tends to ring in our ears as a negative word. In fact, if they told you someone was an addict, you begin to feel sorry for such a person immediately, or most people will. Some of us are so hard and unforgiven. We will hear about someone’s addiction and we will go, “Owo ara e lo fi se ara e” meaning, “he brought it upon himself”. But sometimes, addictions are not self-made. People are sometimes introduced to addictive substances without their own permission, and they end up losing their self-respect, and sometimes their life. I had a friend in secondary school, who was innocuously introduced to Marijuana, and he was hooked. Today, those who introduced him to the drug are living normal lives, but he is a wreck, walking the streets of the city where I grew up.

So how come all of us are addicts, according to my principles of addiction? Well, it’s easy to figure out really. If you look from my point of view of defining addiction as not necessarily caused by an unusual fondness or attachment to negative substance or situation, then you will agree with me that we are addicted to one thing or the other. See if your own addiction is on this list, if not, put in a comment and add your own; sleep, food, drugs; Africa magic, premier league (football), cigarettes, alcohol, codeine, Panadol, ice cream, coke, cocaine, chicken, sex, church, computer games, chess, parties etc.

If you check it, you find that there are things that we cannot resist doing, and we have almost become some sort of junkies to it. We try to stop, but we cannot. We go ‘cold turkey’ but we go back again and again, even on the verge of pain or death, we cannot stop. So trust me, we are all addicts. However, today as I was thinking about addiction, I found out that there is another addiction that I have missed out completely, and that is the phone/social media addiction. These two are twin addictions and you automatically get the other when you subscribe to the first one. It’s either social media driven phone addiction, or smart phone driven social media addiction.

Lives have been ruined by social media; marriages have been annulled because of social media; people have been killed because of social media; destinies have been altered; students have been failing more than they should, all because of social media. All sorts of evil and vices can be associated with our unneccessariy high exposure to social media. Our values, our morality, our character, our society have all been changed because of social media. The truth is we are all guilty of this in one form or the other. The ‘demons’ of social media include WhatsApp; Facebook; WeChat’ Instagram; snapchat; twitter; and I am sure you can name the ones that even I don’t know.

This addiction is like how a fish takes to water. Social Media- we live it, dream it, sleep it, eat it. We have lost the ability to have real face to face conversations with ourselves, except we are chatting. The whole family quality time is messed up as we neglect spouses and children and are Face-booking with friends from long ago who are probably in the other side of the world. 

We have neglected quiet moments for introspection and fellowship with our self, our God, our children or spouse. Visitors come to visit you, but after the initial greetings and conversations, you all end up consumed with your social media life. 

Let me ask, “What do you do last before you go to bed? Social media! What do you do first when you wake up in the morning? Go for the mobile phone because you believe someone has sent you something on social media. We have murdered sleep; we have lost the essence of living as partners (those who have partners) because we are hooked on social media. The first thing we were taught to do in the morning was to pray, but the first thing we do as we wake up is to reach out for our phones. Husbands will hug their phone first before they hug their wives. Wives will sleep with the phone under their pillow (or is it the other way round). We are so consumed with it…. Hence the addiction.

What more, churches are no longer off limits. With services going on, people are likely to be tweeting and posting pics on Instagram. Churches now routinely tweet bits and pieces of message online so that the unchurched can get the message, meanwhile, you who are tweeting are not getting the spirit and even the full letter of the message.

Let me clarify that I don’t have a problem with the smart phone or the social media. I just think that we are increasingly losing sight of what matters in this world because of our dependence on the internet lifestyle. I always think that the most disruptive technology to our lives is the internet, and sadly internet is now available in all kinds of fun. In those days, you will have to take a trip to the cybercafé before you can get freaky. Today, its right in your hands. I was joking with friends the other day about my teenage daughter, and said I have to go and buy a dog. It occurred to me that the dog solution was for the 80s and the 90s. Today, dogs are ineffectual. Once you give you kid a phone or a tab, you have given him/her a key to a world that even you know nothing about.

Let’s excuse the kids and examine how this twin phenomena of smartphone/social media affects the lives of even the adults; with the smartphone and the internet, cheating spouses don’t have found another tool, and cheated spouses only tend to waste their time when they go around snooping to find out if spouses are cheating anymore. They don’t need to step out of their home to cheat. What with chats, photos, videos etc. Wow! It’s such a changed world from my parents’ time…

In any case, the focus of this write-up is not about spousal integrity and all that, rather it’s really about the reality that our lives now are dominated by the smartphone. I am all for technology and the smartphone has really made my life easier considering my vocation. However, anything that controls your life as much as the smartphone does is a menace, and to the extent that we have allowed social media and its influences to determine how we dress; what we eat; how many times to go on vacation; we can be said to be addicted to it.

So what shall we do? For starters, we need to control our usage of the phone, and not the other way round. There should be limits to their usage, and it should not replace your other equally important fellowship times with yourself, your spouse, your kids and your God. If you have fallen too deeply in love with your phone to the point that it lays on your chest when you sleep, then divorce it. 

Perhaps we can all have a no smartphone day in Nigeria sometime? Will it not be fun? No phone, no social media, no internet! Just be home and do the things you were doing pre-phone. At least not long ago, most Nigerians were living in a phoneless age, and life was still beautiful. So can I suggest a no phone day? I will suggest December 25 as at least there should be no work on that day, plus that day will be perfect, at least I am sure I will not get cut and paste Christmas greetings this year. Can you imagine, people cannot even be original with sending season’s greetings anymore. They just copy and paste a nice one and send it around, even to you who sent the exact same message to them. Na wa!

So is anybody up for a No Phone Day on December 25^th? Reply and let’s start the movement… unfortunately we will still need to use the social media and our smart phones to push the campaign! Chei! It seems head or tail, we will lose, but let’s do it anyway.