No, no, this is not a rant. I mean, I genuinely want to rant about something, but that will be for another day. So I’ve been off some apps for some time now. Probably more than a month or two. And there are some apps I’ve never even downloaded before.
And just yesterday, my mom and I were supposed to go somewhere in the evening, but she was late. Not just randomly late. I’m talking about the kind of lateness that would just make you have to cancel the whole appointment because of how late you are.
"Okay, what has your mom’s lateness got to do with the apps you don’t have?" Relax, I'm getting there. So it turned out that she spent about an hour watching TikTok videos. It wasn’t even intentional. She just happened to have gone online to see a TikTok link about a video of one of the Ghanaian celebrities.
She followed the link and watched the video, and by the time she realized, she was watching more videos. And that made her spend so much time watching videos instead of preparing herself for where we were supposed to go.
Angry is an understatement, but I don’t have any big word to express how I felt, so let’s just stick to that. I was fuming the whole of yesterday. I mean in the evening. I saw her on her phone when I was getting ready, so I asked her why she wasn’t getting ready and she told me she was just checking something. Something that was going to take less than a minute.
But by the time I stepped out of my room, she was still sitting where I saw her initially and still glued to her phone. The moment she saw me, she just knew I was disappointed, and I didn’t fail to express it at all. I outrightly asked her, "So what was the point of spending almost an hour on her phone when we have an important occasion to grace?"
I believe that we are in an era where there’s this viral addiction that takes you by surprise. You don’t see it coming but by the time you realize, you’ve spent hours scrolling through your phone. So I have this policy that I use to check my activities all the time, and it’s not even just about screen time.
Any time I’m doing something, I ask, what’s the point? The moment I ask that question and realize that particular activity wouldn’t benefit me or the people around me in any way, I just end it and do something productive.
I think after what happened yesterday, my mom has also adopted my policy because I heard her asking herself, “What’s the point?” when she turned on the TV this morning. And I want to believe, although I was angry at her actions yesterday, this immediate change is definitely a win for me.
Images are mine
