I usually go to sleep at 12:30 a.m..
After roughly seven hours of charging, my phone springs back to life and starts off the morning with, sad to say, the video game Brawl Stars. This happens routinely each day from 7:45-8:15 a.m. and takes place after I finish my morning breakfast burrito from the cafeteria. At this point, my battery life reads at about 80% capacity, which just comes to show that I am not a morning person, waking up unrefreshed.
Throughout the school day, I am sporadically checking Discord and other messaging apps, such as Wechat and Apple Messages. This happens most frequently during tutorial, when I can be found avoiding my homework, usually. My phone battery doesn’t drain too much while checking these messages, and it can be quite refreshing to relay your day to some of my friends.
During lunch break, I can be found, again, enjoying “a few” refreshing games of Brawl Stars with my friends. Around this time, my phone battery will usually have depleted to 50%, which is quite reflective of my personal energy level at that time of day.
As the school day ends, my phone battery is usually hanging about near 30-40%, displaying my exhaustion after a long day at school. However, unlike me, who can take a break now, my phone’s mission is far from over. This is the time of the day when I start obnoxiously calling my friends and asking whether they can hit the downtown cafés with me.
I will then be reminded by my Apple Journal app that I should write about some things that happened today. This is usually my time when I am most focused on studying, kind of like burning the last bits of fuel before they turn to embers.
As I walk home from downtown, there isn’t anything more I can think about other than the amazing nightwalk and picturesque moments in the dark. As the day and my phone battery begins to fade away, I make sure to utilize the rest of it for a beautiful moment; using Adobe Lightroom photography to take shots of the alluring downtown streets.
As the early evening comes to a close, I remember to recharge my phone before studying at home.
Hours later at around midnight, I can be found watching YouTube or listening to Apple Music on my phone, depleting it to around 5% before my nightly recharging begins. Truthfully, I should probably stop staying up so late doing this as I am sacrificing my sleep time and risking not waking up on time tomorrow.
All of this is probably detrimental to my mental and physical health, as I lose a lot of my life to this excessive screen time. Like most teenagers today, if I were to shorten this excessive usage, I could probably live a more fulfilling life pursuing the hobbies I want to pursue. Maybe then my battery life won’t be so low and my energy would be much higher.
