The Case Against My Laptop: On Useful Things Turning into our Virtual Jailers

Lately, I strongly feel that the time I spent on my laptop and internet-surfing made me miss so many important things in life. The time I spent facing my laptop has significantly took away my quality time of engagement with the real “world-out-there” and the time for more meaningful personal “face-to-face” encounters with others—with alive and warm human beings. It’s true, my laptop is a very helpful gadget in my academic work, in my communications, in sorting-out my schedules, and in my search for data or information on the net; yet my laptop (and the internet) can be a poor replacement for what is truly significant in real life face-to-face communication, living and warm personal relationships, and real journey to real places, etc.

While laptops and the internet are helpful tools for our convenience, they can also be our virtual jailers and prison-houses all at the same time, if we are compulsively undisciplined; since they can rob us of things that are really essential in life, and they can effectively steal our time from us by investing our quality time on things that are non-beneficial and non-productive. I must confess that there were times when I felt very guilty for not being able to do the most pressing and needful things because I spent my precious time wastefully and unnecessarily in front of my laptop, surfing whatever information the internet has dished out for me, thereby ruining my well planned-out schedule.

What were further lessons in life and in living that I have learned from my ranting against this laptop of mine? Well, I realized that there are many beneficial things in our life, aside from our laptops, that can be, in effect, our own prison-houses if we do not know how to prioritize what are really the essentials in life. I also realized that despite the wonders of our modern technological gadgets, these cannot replace the timeless relational values that make us human and humane. These values are: genuine personal relationships, cordial face-to-face communication, unique irreplaceability of persons over things, spirited exploration of real places, spaces, and locations (and not just virtual), and the down-to-earth nature of life’s experiences. Advance modern technology and its virtual wonders can never replace real life in its fullness, variety, and multi-dimensions. Technology is still a poor imitator of the real “world-out-there”. The virtual world of the internet can effectively imprison us in the world-of-make-believe and entangle us further into its web of escapisms, lies, deceptions, fantasies, and illusions.

Ultimately speaking; it is real life-living, real life-experiences, and real life-adventures in the real world that can lead us to discover our own life’s meaning and significance. It is high time now for us to walk-away from our own self-imposed prison doors towards the freedom of unfettered and uncluttered living. One has to go out from the limitations that one impose upon oneself in order to live a life full of meaning and relevance. It is time to leave our narrow self-made box and journey towards infinite possibilities that our freedom can take us. This challenging point reminds me of an unforgettable quote from a British romantic movie, “Gypsy Woman” (released in 2001) which my wife and I saw some years ago. The vivacious young Gypsy lass from the English countryside asked the stiff-lipped Londoner lawyer who fell in love with her: “Oh… so you want to be a traveller like me? Then, what are you waiting for? Throw away your geography book now and move your lazy feet towards that wagon yonder and let’s start travelling…”

However, our laptops are not the only jailers in our life. Our book-knowledge can be a jail, our own school can also be our prison-house, and our own cherished ideology (or even our own religion) can be a dark dungeon that we dug for ourselves if we make them substitutes to real life experiences and real life insights. All these things I mentioned above are beneficial to our life; but they can be our fatal ropes that can practically hang upside-down our emotional and spiritual life if we cling to them obsessively; thereby making us miss experiencing and savoring the depths and profundity of what life in all its fullness and multi-facetedness can really teach us.

Therefore, let us go out of the jail that we made for ourselves and start exploring the richness of what life can offer us. Let’s leave the stultifying and suffocating confines of our book-knowledge and proceed onwards in our journey to really experiencing, tasting, and enjoying life itself. Let’s close our verbose books now and begin to experience timeless wisdom beyond words and concepts. We can only learn this genuine wisdom of human living in the University of Real Life and of Practical Experience—this is the only school that really matters and worth enrolling throughout our whole life!