April on the Great Barrier Reef 2013

Get a Real Life
Captain Trevor Jackson

“Your friends haven’t done anything new lately”……….or so I was informed just moments ago. I opened my inbox and halfway down the page, next to the Facebook and Twitter icons, was that message strewn across the page. It threw me for a second, then I realized it was 5am and the message simply referred to the interim between when I last checked Facebook and now. It’s kind of arrogant though, don’t you think? Internet based social media pages declaring that you lot are BORING. Especially since, according to those same pages, posting a photo of the pub meal you’re about to eat is a worthy event. In that case the message this morning may have read ‘Joe Blow has posted a photo”. That is social media speak for ‘Go back on Facebook and waste another of your precious hours’.

As 5am stretched to 6am I began to wonder how much time I would waste today just surfing the web for nothing in particular…checking out Facebook, tweeting, musing over photos of some Kardashian baby, or considering whether or not Beyonce really does have too much junk in the trunk. It really is an insufferable waste of time …….and as each year passes we just do more and more and more of it.

Heck even little kids are into it. My daughter, not yet three, already asks Mummy for the iPad the moment she wakes up in the morning, which to me begs the question….Where are we heading with all this? What will the adult lives of today’s kids be like if they live their youth on YouTube? Enough I say!

A month ago I decided on an experiment……….Ditch the computer and mobile phone for four weeks and see what happens. I was laughed at… “It can’t be done in this day and age Trevor! How will work get hold of you? What if the school needs to contact you? It’s irresponsible!” All valid points no doubt but I ditched them anyway and you know what I found? …….PEACE………..the kind of peace you find in the mountains, the kind of peace you find in bed on a rainy Sunday morning, the kind of peace you find on a sandy bottom 30 metres under water………those are the types of things we should be doing with our precious hours.

Now I know the iPads, iMacs and iPhones won’t approve, and all our friends will be reliably informed that we ‘haven’t done anything new lately’ , but isn’t it about time we got out there, regained control, and allowed ourselves to get a real life?

Rogues Gallery