Translator: Marília Correia Reviewer: Lalla Khadija Tigha
I love this place.
I really, really do.
I think it's one of the most beautiful places on campus.
If you think about it for a second,
people travel across countries just to take a walk on campus,
perhaps take a Snapchat,
post an Instagram story.
Show their friends and family what a beautiful place
they've just visited.
This place reminds me of a story that happened just a few months ago.
In fact, it happened by that bench right there.
I was walking with a friend of mine,
and as she was looking around, she looks at me and she says,
"It's funny how I have been here for about five months now
and I've never taken a minute or two to sit down,
embrace and appreciate the beauty of such a place."
And I laughed,
and at that second I looked at her and I said,
"It's funny how I've been here for about four years now,
and I've never done so either."
And the usual thing happened, we rushed across campus,
and at the end of the day, just before getting to bed,
I was reflecting upon the conversation,
and I asked myself the question, "Why?"
"Why have I never taken a minute or two
to sit down and appreciate
and embrace the place I just claimed I love?"
I mean, the irony!
And at that second, I threw up all the big questions:
Is my life simply too busy with essays?
Or my dissertation taking so much of my time?
What exactly is it that has been causing my life to become numb
to appreciating the beauty around me?
And then amongst the hundred reasons that came out,
one of them stood out.
And the reason it is, funnily enough, the reason it stood out
is because whilst actually having these thoughts,
I was busy spending an hour scrolling up and down Instagram,
Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn,
and the list went on and on and on.
And that's the first moment I came to a realization
that I might have found part of the reason
why I've become numb to appreciating the beauty around me.
I'd like to reflect this talk in three words,
and it's
Three words I'm very confident
most of us in this room today will be thinking of one term--
and that's the iPhone.
But I'm not here to talk to you about the iPhone or even the technology,
but to talk to you about the social platforms.
The social platforms that claim to make us more social.
In fact, they claim to make the world flat.
At the end of this talk, I hope to achieve two things,
very simple things.
The first being an insight.
Just like everyone else, I'd hoped to give you an insight about the topic,
why it's significant and why it's important to escape from it.
But the second thing, I would like to leave you with a challenge,
a challenge in the sense of it's a promise --
a promise for yourself to change for today,
and a promise to change for tomorrow.
So, here's where I want to take a second
to ask you a very simple but rather significant question.
And it's --
Are you all aware?
Are you aware of the widespread obsession that we've fallen into?
And when I say
I'm talking about the children, teenagers, and elder people.
The widespread obsession has hit us all,
at least most of us.
They say the average human today uses his or her phone
about 150 times in a single day.
If you accumulate that in hours terms,
that could be up to five hours of your day spent looking at a screen.
So that's about a quarter to a fifth of your day,
looking down at a screen.
If you accumulate that across your lifetime,
believe it or not, that could be up to 15 years of your life
looking down at a screen.
Whatever it is that you're doing while looking down on a screen is
the statistics still show significance.
I would like to share with you what I believe
just make up a few ingredients of the obsessive recipes,
as what I call them.
If the first and the last thing you do in your day is just scroll down,
scroll down and up Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter--
and the list could go on--
I'm very sorry to say this, but that's very, very obsessive.
If you're having lunch with someone that you love,
in fact, if you're having lunch with anyone,
and you're having a conversation, whatever it is,
and your phone is facing up on the table,
that's also very obsessive.
And believe it or not, funnily enough,
even if the phone is facing down, that's also very obsessive.
Because your attention is very divided between the person and the phone.
So, here I want to take a second to ask you the bigger questions.
Are you aware of how these social platforms
are affecting your attention span?
Attention span that's been falling down
as research would say --
down to eight seconds.
In fact, other research and studies have found that this is a second slower
than a goldfish.
Are you also aware that these social platforms
have been affecting our social interactions?
Where they are destroying our social relationships
rather than actually building them.
But you see, this is not really surprising for me.
We've become so conditioned in interacting from over a screen
that we've become very, very impatient.
In the sense that now we can get anything in a click of a button,
we can buy anything in the click of a button.
We can talk to anyone in just a second.
So,you can imagine how that affects our attention span,
thus it's falling down.
But also, our social contact that's affecting--
it's destroying the way we interact,
that we've forgotten what it even means
to look someone in the eye and have a conversation.
And I'm not really surprised, eye contact --
If you look someone in the eye, by default, you can see through a person.
And that scares us, that's a very awkward thing to do--
look someone in the eye.
And we happen to have the right tools to avoid it.
But the bigger question is--
I'm referring to the timers, to my luck here --
Are you also aware of how these are affecting your identity?
This is why I want to ask you,
when you look at yourself in the mirror, what do you see?
Do you see yourself the way you define yourself,
or do you see yourself the way others define you?
From filtering pictures over Instagram
to narrowing down our characters on Twitter,
our lives have simply become -- and I'm very sorry to say this --
extremely fake.
But this fake life also happens to be very perfect.
And funnily enough, everyone around us, most of us at least,
they're also perfecting their lives.
We're all filtering our pictures,
We're all trying to portray a perfect life,
because if it's not a perfect life,
if it's not a positive life, it simply does not go on social media.
It simply does not get the likes,
it doesn't get the shares, the retweets.
And that's something we don't want.
And so we start faking our lives.
And this is when we start falling into two simply traps,
but very significant.
Trap number one
is when we start comparing ourselves to everyone else around us.
We would always want to be the other perfect person.
We would always want to increase our likes,
and that's very dangerous.
But the bigger danger is -- which is trap number two --
is when you start comparing yourself, not to everyone else,
but rather when you start comparing yourself
to you.
You start creating an ideal self of yourself, it's like a superhero.
But that superhero just happens to be very fake.
And this is when you start driving your life aimlessly.
You start following the crowd just because you think you should.
But it's not because you want to.
But believe it or not,
at some point in my life, of course, I was amongst the big crowd.
But then at another point, I left.
This is what I'd like to share with you,
how I escaped all of this negativity.
So, how did I escape?
About four years ago,
obviously coming all the way from the Middle East
to Glasgow,
you can imagine what kind of a cultural shock I faced.
Alongside, of course, the beautiful weather outside,
and that was also an even bigger shock.
And alongside being away from family, from parents, from friends,
and from everyone around me,
alongside having bad grades because it's a different system,
I remember very clearly, I called my dad. I said, "Dad, listen,
I can't do this, I have to leave. I can't.
I'm falling, and my grades are bad, I need to leave."
And after the usual inspirational speech, which I appreciate,
I decided to stay.
But I remember very clearly, I looked at myself in the mirror that day,
and I asked myself one simple question:
"What exactly do I know about myself to have even decided I want to stay here?
Where do I want to be in four years?
What's my objective of deciding to stay here?
Where do I want to be?" And that's a big question.
And that's when I found question marks everywhere.
I couldn't define myself.
And I decided to do the cliché thing of finding myself.
Now, so how did I do it? I traveled to Turkey.
So, I decided to travel to Turkey for four days.
And luckily enough, no one wanted to come along.
So it was a solo trip.
At the first instance, I thought, "What kind of trip will that be?"
But then when the trip finished, I can tell you this,
it was the most beautiful and liberating moment of my life.
Because for the first moment ever,
I was away from social media, I didn't have any Wi-Fi,
I was able to do whatever I wanted to do, whenever.
I took a ten-hour bus because I felt like it,
and no one could tell me otherwise.
I didn't have to perfect my life to anyone else.
I didn't have to portray a perfect life over social media.
So I got to meet a group of strangers, as you can see,
and I honestly did have a lot of fun.
And that was the first moment ever that I saw that "pause thread."
It's not an actual thread
but I picked up that thread and I liked it.
For the first moment ever I can pause, I can reflect,
I can understand myself.
So I asked myself the question, "What can I do to pause more often?
What exactly is that moment of my day
that I would do and I would love to appreciate
and embrace it more often?"
So I thought to myself, what else is better than breakfast?
So, not necessarily because breakfast is an exciting one --
in this case, it's soup --
it's not really.
It's just because breakfast is the only time of my day
that I believe I have time for myself.
It's an hour of my day that I get to daydream,
I get to set mental objectives,
I get to start my day fresh.
Because for the rest of the day-- and I think we'd all agree--
we have demands, we have life goals, we have objectives,
alongside using your phone 150 times a day,
alongside if you're using your phone five hours of your time.
How stressful is that?
So, why not take a moment in the morning to start my day fresh?
So now, I was obsessed over pausing.
I'm not obsessed over social media anymore.
I wanted to pause more often.
So, how could I pull that thread towards my life more often?
How could I do that?
So I thought to myself,
there's one moment, and one thing that I do a lot during my day,
and I could remove, I could really take out of my life
to embrace my day more often.
So I deleted Instagram and Snapchat.
And it's that moment when I realized I didn't have to travel to pause
or pause during my day.
Now I could pause in the morning.
So, now I could pause during my day.
There are small moments which I can appreciate now.
But by no means am I saying
that to pause you have to travel to Turkey,
or have a good breakfast, or delete Instagram or Snapchat.
We're all different.
You should just control it before it controls you.
And this is the whole point because we're all very different.
And this is where I would love to pass on the stage
to every single person here today,
and ask you the question, "How have you escaped?"
"What is it that you do to escape?"
Because escape and pause is not necessarily a thing that you'd go home
and you pick up a pen and a paper, and write bullet points --
How do I pause?
Not at all.
Pausing is the things that you do already.
Pausing is that hour of book that you read on a daily basis,
or the gym you go on a weekly basis,
or the walk you go on.
Even being here today could be a pause moment.
But the danger is not being aware of it.
Because if you're not aware of it,
then you wouldn't really care if it goes away from your life.
So now you see that hour of reading that you used to do,
or the gym that you used to go to-- you no longer do it,
because your life apparently got busier.
And that's the whole point, that we're all different,
and you have to know what your pause moments are.
But by all means, I'm not saying that we're all unaware and we don't pause.
If you're aware and you pause, congratulations.
That's perfect.
You're on the right track.
If not, I'll urge you to start today because a lot can change.
And I mean it when I say a lot.
And what does change?
Very, very simple.
It's a very simple idea.
You start to appreciate beauty more often.
But beauty is not just about walking through the main campus
and appreciating how beautiful the architecture is
or the paintings are.
Beauty does not just happen to be about the external world.
Rather, beauty in this sense changes definition.
Beauty becomes about you,
becomes about your personality,
becomes about your objectives, about your goals,
about your dreams, about your potential --
everything that makes you, you.
And only when you understand that
will you be able to get a stronger identity,
better relationships and a different perspective.
Because your life doesn't have to change;
it's your perspective that changes.
So now, instead of just hearing people,
you start listening and you start listening proactively.
Instead of looking at your phone while interacting with someone,
you start actually giving eye contact,
and you'd be proud of it and you'd be confident about it.
And that's the most important thing.
And here's where I want to just --
I started this talk by saying --
hoping that I would achieve two things.
The first being an insight.
An insight about the topic, and I hope I did.
I hope, although it was very quick,
although I hope I showed you what social media could do,
and why it's very important to escape it,
and why it's very important to find yourself.
Because I must honestly confess right now,
if I hadn't done all of these things four years ago,
found that "pause thread" and kept pulling it towards my life,
I wouldn't even be on this stage today.
But you know what's even worse?
I wouldn't have even been aware that being here today
was even an opportunity for myself.
Because I would have looked at myself in the mirror
and I would have had question marks everywhere.
And I would have simply said,
"Being on the stage is out of reach."
And that's me watching an opportunity pass by my side,
and I'm consciously allowing it.
And this is where I hope I've given you an insight.
But the second thing I said I would hope I achieve
is more than an insight, because insights are words,
and words can go around in your mind for only so long,
but they could fade away, although they are very significant.
But what's more significant are actions.
So I'd like this point to be a point in your life where you look back at it,
whenever you feel you are lacking self-identity,
whenever you feel you're using your phone 150 times a day,
or spending a quarter of your day looking down a screen.
Look back at this moment.
And this is where I would like to ask you all for a favor.
So, could every person in this room, including myself,
could you all take your phones out,
just for a second.
I'll do the same.
Perfect. And hence the title of the talk,
could we all slide to unlock?
And just unlock your phone basically.
And if we could all just raise them as high as you can,
just as high as you can,
just let the screens shine.
Perfect. That's very nice.
Wow! that's a very nice scene.
OK, you see, I won't talk for long because hands get sore
and I'm not going to tell you to throw them at me.
But a great man once said,
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
I've seen what social media is and what it could do to your life.
And this is where I'm sliding to power off.
But the bigger question is,
what will you do?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)