You arrive home after completing your finals, right before your winter break. You still have to complete loads of homework, your science projects, and all the chores your mum left you. The left side of your brain is thinking about the complex math problem you saw in yesterday’s practice paper; the right side of your brain is thinking about the music piece you must learn for the concert the next day. Amidst the hustle and bustle, what if you could just sit down — to let your head breathe, and to give yourself time to relax and wind down, just for a little while? What if all you needed to do to relieve your stress was to reach for a stopwatch in your cabinet, and press a single button?
A stopwatch that can stop time: that is the gadget of my dreams. On both an individual and a societal level, this stopwatch can bring a multitude of benefits to people’s lives. At a personal level, this stopwatch can help people both physically and mentally. After a long, stressful day, I might want to have a workout session by jogging outside or playing basketball; for others, boxing and sweating out their stress might work perfectly: someone might envision their least favourite teacher on a sandbag and take out all their stress there. Others might just want to take a restful slumber or a long coffee break after working on a stressful project. The issue with all these things — workouts, naps, and breaks — is that they require time. Time is the most finite resource on the planet; once it has been expended or lost, time will never come back. Having a magic stopwatch could eliminate this problem. Now, regardless of what you would like to use your time for, a simple press of a button could release and relieve your stress in a matter of seconds.
Aside from relieving one’s stress, this stopwatch can also alleviate and minimise inconveniences. Imagine this scenario: your friend’s house is a thirty minutes’ drive away — but you woke up late, and the party is going to start in five minutes! This could be the tightest friend you have known for decades — being late for his party would be a hostile slap in the face and missing it completely would be a massive shame. Sadly, without this magic stopwatch, many people find themselves missing important moments, meetings, or appointments, simply because of random factors outside their control. These poignant missed opportunities can often fill us with regret and wistfulness for a lifetime. With a magic stopwatch, though, we could prevent this issue from occurring: logistical problems, which can sometimes break apart the most longstanding friendships, will become a thing of the past.
For the individual, the relentless ticking of time is usually one of the largest causes of unhappiness. Because we are chained and enslaved to time, we feel the urge to constantly improve our productivity and are unable to find joy in the simple things in life. I therefore hope that the gadget of my dreams can bring some balance to people’s lives, allowing them both more time to meet important deadlines, while also giving them the space to unwind and calm down.
This technology not only has benefits to the individual; it also has veritable and positive effects on wider society. With more time overall, people can become more productive, efficient, and happy. Unlike the status quo — in which people feel stressed and rushed from the unstoppable passage of time — a world with this gadget is one in which people treat others more gently and kindly, as they no longer suffer from the quotidian pressures of life. The benefits, however, do not end there. This stopwatch could have positive ramifications on family bonds as well, an issue I care about intimately. Currently, parents spend little time with their children because their time is absorbed by work; children spend little time with their parents because of the time they spend on schoolwork. Families now rarely eat dinner together because everyone is too busy; this has accentuated the decline of the strength of nuclear families in recent decades. This stopwatch could reverse this trend. By giving parents more time to complete their work in the office and children more time to finish their homework in school, families will find it much easier to carve out quality time for their loved ones. Finding a time to sit down and eat, once a Herculean task, will now be a much simpler affair. This can help to fix the broken status quo and ameliorate family bonds that have been in disrepair for many years.
However, it must be admitted that there are some negative aspects to this stopwatch as well; there is a chance that it will be abused and misused. It could make people lazier and more likely to procrastinate; knowing that one has a limitless supply of time might lead some to lose the motivation to put in sustained and focused effort, thinking that they can make up for this in the future. This is a possible pitfall of the gadget that must be addressed.
A few creative methods could be used to counter this issue. First, the stopwatch could be designed with a natural time limit, forcing the user to return to the “real world” once a stipulated amount of time has been expended. Second, the stopwatch could be designed with a buzzer that starts to ring once the user becomes lazy or starts to procrastinate. The buzzer could turn louder and louder if the user chooses to ignore the alarm initially. Just as a car seatbelt alarm sounds if someone fails to put on their seatbelt, this technology can serve as a warning to the user and jolt them back to reality. A combination of the above methods will certainly be effective in making people recognise their overreliance on the device and prevent the abuse of this gadget. As such, although the propensity for procrastination is worrying, I believe that there can be safeguards implemented to ensure that this stopwatch serves its original purpose and benefits humanity in the process.
In conclusion, everyone in society deserves this stopwatch. Although the technology may sound unfeasible and requires numerous scientific breakthroughs to eventually attain, I believe that we have all earned a well-deserved break and that society will benefit from such a device. We are currently living in a topsy-turvy world with cruel wars, extreme global warming, and an impending extinction crisis. Despite our recovery from the pandemic, 2023 was still a tough year for everyone around the planet. I hope that this gadget can give people a chance to reflect, develop their awareness, and feel sympathy for their common man; I believe that it holds revolutionary potential to make life more meaningful as people become less tense and stressed. It is therefore the gadget of my dreams — a gadget probably better than anything that could exist on this side of paradise
By: Phillip Yoon
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