Last week I came across an interesting news item about a small temple in Chiang Mai having come up with a cool idea to get visitors to ponder their lives. It has erected many large timetables around the premises, each detailing the number of days people at each age have left to live if they are to die at 75, the average lifespan for Thais.
At the end of each table is a long yet meaningful message based on the Buddhist teaching, which says: "We were born because of our past karma. We are bound to pay it off and face its consequences. So why do we put the blame on stars in the sky? It's actually karma that determines the destiny of human lives. Life in this world is very short, and only one night left for us is already a blessing. Have you prepared yourself for the last day of your life? Don't live in ignorance."
According to the temple's abbot, those timetables were created out of his best intentions. He wanted to warn people to live their valuable lives to the fullest -- by practising meditation, observing the precepts, doing only good deeds and always being careful.
Looking back at our society, wherein all of us tend to keep our heads down and our eyes fixed on our mobile phones everywhere we go, I wonder if any of us would care to read, or even notice, if similar warnings are put up around our home and work places.
We seem to pay more attention to what is appearing on those little screens rather than the world around us. We never realise that our time is being stolen by the wise guys behind the giant tech companies, who are happy to see us busy with what they have to offer on our phones.
Four months ago, Time magazine wrote about how our addiction to phones is actually "programmed" by the big tech firms in the Silicon Valley. They share the very same business model that aims to make us stay glued to their apps so that they can make money by selling our attention and access to our personal data to advertisers and others.
To achieve this goal, the creators of thousands of apps, interfaces and devices have deployed the knowledge of "persuasive technology", a relatively new field of research that applies advances in neuroscience and behavioural psychology to deliberately encourage us to keep scrolling on our phones, going back to open their apps more often and spending as much time as possible on their platforms.
According to the article, the ploy is common for the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Netflix, known to have tried every means to make us addicted to their platforms. Even the CEO of Netflix, a giant provider of subscription-based online streaming of films and television programmes, once told investors: "When we watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We're competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it's a very large pool of time."
His remark might sound like a joke but it has a lot to say about the ethical culture of those tech companies. They seem to only care about making more money and turn a deaf ear to the accusation of many that they are creating addictive products that might somehow ruin our physical, mental or even social health. I hope this ugly truth can open the eyes of many people in Thailand where, according to the statistics from the Global Digital Reports 2018 by We Are Social and Hootsuite, each of us spends nearly five hours a day on our phones -- mostly text-chatting, watching videos and playing games.
We have yet to know how using the gadgets for hours every day can affect our brains but we can't deny that our ability to concentrate on or stay attentive to what is in front of us has been weakening ever since smartphones entered our lives.
Honestly, I have nothing against smartphones; they make lives much easier in many ways. But I think it's time for us to take a break and look back to see if we're being slaves to the gadgets to the point where we forget to live our lives in a more meaningful way.
We're living in a world where a handful of people are racing to come up with new technologies that are getting better at manipulating our thoughts and actions.
It's just a matter of whether we can see through this mind-control game and have the will to break ourselves free from it.
Patcharawalai Sanyanusin is a writer for the Life section of the Bangkok Post.