Screen Time Cannot Be Worse Than My Dumb And Dangerous Childhood

Whatever you do on a screen, you can’t light it on fire

indi.ca
5 min readJan 26, 2021
We actually lit garbage cans on fire

Amma, stop reading.

When I was a kid we were bored all the time, so we lit shit on fire and did all kinds of dangerous stuff. The hypothetical dangers of screen time are nothing compared to this. Statistics show that young people today drink less and have sex later, but that’s not my point. I’ll just talk about my life. Screen time could not possibly be worse than the dumb, dangerous, and explosive shit I did when I was young.

This is a brief and non-exhaustive list of things that I have done growing up in suburban Ohio, before screen time:

  • Arson
  • Shoplifting
  • Attempted cow-tipping
  • Teepeeing
  • Stealing street signs
  • Dumpster diving
  • Being bitten by raccoons in dumpsters
  • Every drug possible

Please tell me how ‘being stuck in my room all day’ could have been worse than all this. If my parents knew, they would have been thrilled to keep me in my room. Instead our parents told us to ‘go outside’ and outside was boring, unless it was on fire. AMMA STOP READING.

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indi.ca

Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva is a Sri Lankan writer. Follow me at www.indi.ca, or just email me at indi@indi.ca.