Your Phone Is A Parasitoid Wasp

More often than not we are lost in thought. Oh, and your phone is a parasitoid wasp.

Like many, I find myself regularly interweaving with the parallel dimensions of daydreaming. Brief moments of time before we realise, we are lost in our own thoughts, a type of brain fog clouding over the mind like the rising mist of a winter’s wood.

Almost. But not exactly, I liken daydreaming to a frozen laptop. Too much going on can lead to not much happening at all, and if anything at all is happening then too much is it. It is a symptom of a mixed-bag of emotions, the bonfire to the moth, both attractive and dangerous.

Breathing little and stilling oneself is a rare happening and quite possibly the moments we unintentionally slip out of focus are the cooling-off points of mental hardship and fantasy driven anecdotes. Involuntary reboots for refusing to defragment volatile thoughts dancing around a meandering, procrastinating broth of mind.

Today, we switch on to zone out. Endlessly, mindlessly, anxiously scrolling through screen parchments kept on us almost 24 hours a day. It’s a drug normalised by society that provides very few sobering moments of self-realisation that we are whipping ourselves into submission. Mind-controlled by automation. A phone is a phone, and if you let it take over your life, you won’t have one.

Read: Turn Off Everything, Embrace Everything

The smartphone is cunning. Smart to disable its host through fantastical bait dangled in front of us, preventing us from proactively moving forward. Its ingredients are all useful, interesting, boring and insanely addictive at the same time.

Like certain types of mind controlling insect (more specifically the parasitoid wasp larvae) they feed us messages causing us to act erratically and in unconstituted ways. Our phones live on us and our emotions in a similar fashion. Breaking us down automatically. And automatically, we give in.

Why we tolerate such actions, is anyone’s guess. Phones and their aesthetically pleasing wallpapering apps collect not only our time but our personal information and a detailed analysis of each individual. If approached by a stranger to hand over our very private data, we would undoubtedly gaze upon them with tilted heads and wide eyes. But as I said, your phone is a parasitoid wasp. And there is nothing you can do about it.