Walk through any building or open space on campus, including a classroom, and many of the students you'll see will be absorbed in a laptop, smartphone or other device. Too often, you'll see friends out to dinner sitting around the table tapping away instead of interacting with each other. Visit a thriving online community like Reddit, and you'll find countless users (many of whom are young people) making jokes about how they haven't been outside in days because they're so consumed with the Internet, gaming and other virtual pursuits. It sounds like a sitcom joke, but this kind of situation is all to real.
Our entitled, instant gratification-generation needs self-control. We need to take walks, read books; we need to look up and interact with the world beyond the screens in front of our faces, because out there is where life takes place.

Of course, all of these technological amenities are fantastic innovations, and they have undoubtedly made our lives richer in countless ways. But there's clearly a dark side that many young people choose to ignore in a cavalier manner.

To me, the scariest thing is that we're the guinea pigs. Our parents spent their childhoods and teenage years completely without computers and the Internet and have only adopted these technologies in middle age. In addition to these harms that we'll suffer, we have no idea how our constant use of gadgets and screens will affect our physical, mental and social health.

Personally, I'm worried about my eyes. According to WebMD, "Between 50 and 90 percent of people who work at a computer screen have at least some symptoms of eye trouble," and people who spend similarly large amounts of time playing video games can also experience eye problems. There's a documented medical issue called computer vision syndrome, which is even discussed on the American Optometric Association website.
But perhaps more seriously, it's also true that people can suffer emotional harm by distancing themselves from reality, and many college students will tell you of someone whose social life has fallen apart, replaced by League of Legends or fantasy football. Internet addiction is a serious issue, and one study by Aviv Weinstein at the Hadassah Medical Organization in Israel cites its prevalence in the United States and Europe as being as high as 8.2 percent.

Excessive computer use and addiction can lead to mental disorders like depression, anxiety and sleep disorders, with one study published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine suggesting that to prevent such problems, adult workers should be limited to less than five hours a day on their computers.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm not standing on very solid ground from which to lecture. I spend much more time than I should playing video games, watching streaming sports and browsing social networking sites, sinking into this alternate world to relax, escape and discover-and subsequently starting to lose the ability to do so elsewhere. It's a dangerous precedent to set for myself and for our generation. To use a clich?(c) often employed by lawyers, Internet addiction can be a slippery slope to an empty, self-centered life.

As suggested by the researchers in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine study, I believe that the solution is moderation. When I was a child, my parents placed a "screen time" limit on me, shutting me off after I had spent one or two hours playing games on the computer or watching TV. These days, I sometimes wish I still had some force in my life to do the same; I find it incredibly difficult to monitor and regulate myself.

I'm going to try to, though. For an Environmental Studies class I'm taking this semester, I have an assignment for which I am asked to find a "place in the woods" and visit it every few weeks, sketching plants and trees and jotting down my observations. The first time I went out into the Sachar Woods, and I stayed for an hour and a half, enjoying the foliage, the weather and most of all, the quiet. As I was leaving the woods and walking back to campus, I realized with an uncomfortable jolt that I couldn't remember the last time I had gone hiking, taken a walk in the woods or even passed a few hours without thinking about things tied to the virtual world.

I'm not going to go "cold turkey" and stop using my computer or the Internet altogether. I am, however, going to try to use them more moderately. Real life is too beautiful and vibrant to constantly ignore.