Look Up 2

I made a video 10 years ago, and it gained millions of views,

It went viral on the internet, and was featured on the news.

It warned how social media and smartphones are pulling us apart,

But we’re looking down more than ever now, and I don’t know where to start.

I’m aware that posting this online, may make me look like a hypocrite,

But if everyone’s on their phones, there’s no better way to deliver it.

We used to go on the internet, to make our real lives easier,

But now we’re online more than offline, and our lives have never felt busier.

Since I made the first video, so many new updates have arrived,

There was no TikTok, no Reels, the newest iPhone was the 5.

How much of our lives are now lost to mindlessly scrolling?

How much of our time are we now actually controlling?

The average person will spend 34 years staring at a screen,

That’s time you won’t get back, time that could have been… special.

It takes just ten thousand hours to master new things,

But we trade our dreams for memes, as we surrender to pings.

It’s become an obsession, and we show no signs of stopping,

We rely on our smartphones for work, play and shopping.

We even upload our love lives, relying on apps for dating,

It’s like our lives have been downgraded, while our phones keep updating.

We’re all watching the world through a window that we hold in our hands,

We turn the camera on ourselves and our lives into brands.

Our profiles tell lies about what we’re going through,

As we prioritize selfies over sharing what’s true.

We document our whole lives online, posting everywhere we go,

We’re a generation of show offs, with little to show.

We know it’s all fake yet still hate how it feels,

As we struggle to live up to our own highlight reels.

We turn our friends into audiences, and our lives become a performance,

Where sharing and comparing become of utmost importance.

There’s a necessity to record things, or else it’s like it never happened,

Trading memories for attention, now filtered and captioned.

We’ve been conditioned to be this way, this is all by design,

A handful of tech companies, making money from our minds.

Social media is not free when it’s our data they take,

The more of your life they can harvest, the more money they make.

So they hook us all in, and make us addicted to screens,

Using tricks and techniques inspired by slot machines.

A small group of billionaires, influencing billions of people,

Controlling how we act, think & live. How is this legal?

Anxiety, depression and self-harm are all on the rise,

At a time we look at our phones more than in people’s eyes.

It’s no surprise we feel poisoned when we are all equipped,

With devices that light our brains the same as a drug addict.

Yet we give screens to our kids, and watch them withdraw at speed,

Missing out on skills and experiences that they need to succeed.

Experts plead with schools and parents to take smartphones away,

So that children raised by algorithms, don’t forget how to play.

Don’t scroll instead of sleep and become zombies by day.

But it is possible to live in the real world, and still thrive in the digital,

Nobody is saying we should get rid of it all.

We are the lucky generation, who have this technology to hold,

So let’s choose a life well-lived, and refuse a life well-scrolled.

Let’s live our lives out loud, and use these tools to serve a purpose,

We can choose how we use them, and refuse to let them hurt us.

Rather than turn us into consumers, we can use this tech for more,

To learn languages, to build companies, to highlight hunger and war.

In the right set of hands, our phones can build a better reality,

Instead of turning us into robots, they can improve upon humanity.

Like the difference this one person made, to every person on the planet,

Because they used their phone for good, rather than just out of habit.

But none of these things ever happened, and will never have any of this,

If we’re all too busy looking down, that we…

There is a right time and a wrong time to be staring at a screen,

Like a how text that could wait, can lead to a life unseen,

A life filled with dreams that will never be known

A life filled with memories that will never be grown,,

A life like this one, a life like your own.

Our lives are worth more than anything on a phone.

Look up from your phone, or use it the right way,

It’s not just your life you may be wasting today.