“It’s because of all those screens,” the lady said to her daughter. “Get off your phone, Bella.”
The screentime epidemic is not an epidemic. A bit of headaches here and there, some dried eyes, a lack of sleep on a couple of nights. It’s not cancer, it’s not Parkinson’s, it’s not paralysis or radioactive poisoning or a steel beam going through your abdomen and coughing up and vomiting blood and slowly losing consciousness. It’s not a disease at all. There is a certain feel when you sit at a table of six and all five of your friends are looking on each of their small devices tucked into their palms, fingers furiously typing or texting away. There’s a tug that comes with a row of computers at a Starbucks, or sitting behind someone watching YouTube at a lecture hall, or the way that flat, glassy surfaces of LED has seeped into every crevice and pinholes of humanity. And my head maybe hurts, but so does everyone’s. And my eyes dry up, and so do all my friends. And I’m lazy if I watch shorts and reels instead of doing assignments and irresponsible when I fall asleep in class after staying up, and I’m lame if I refuse to keep up with the trends and memes and the foundation of social culture of the 2020s that underlies, like a silent propane leak on the floor, every conversation and small talk, and I’m cynical and overexaggerating if I mention the aforementioned notion. There is no truly organic conversation, and technology facilitates the most menial human task anyway, and thus there’s no harm in incorporating and embracing what the evolution of humankind has come to.
I guess it’s not too bad.
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Prompt from Daily Themes Week 10: Adjectives
Write a theme in which you describe a large object or event using understatement/litotes (calling a thing less than it is to suggest that it is actually larger). Note: your effects here might involve litotes’ tendency to enhance credibility/narrative authority.