GREETINGS, everyone. Once again, welcome to Saturday Digital Zen.
This week’s topic arrives without ceremony. It is not carefully packaged or scheduled. It simply appeared – and I hope you take a moment to reflect on what the title itself is quietly asking before we even begin.
Your hand has been on the mouse for eight hours. You did not notice when it started.
This morning, you sat down at your desk. Monitor glowing. Keyboard waiting. Mouse in your palm – that small, smooth plastic object named after an animal that scurries, hides, survives by staying small and quick; a creature that understands fear and avoidance.
Funny, isn’t it? We gave this tool the name of something alive. Something that runs from traps. Yet we grip it all day. We control it. We move it. We click it. Thousands of times. Until the wrist tightens, until the shoulders ache, and still we do not stop.
Behind the mouse, monitor, keyboard, desk and chair sits a wider machine – the economy, institutions, and governance we rarely name. And within it, you hold the mouse, while value is extracted from your steady attention and constant engagement.
Think about that for a moment.
We have lived through an age of transformation. Your grandfather held a pen.
Your father knew the typewriter. We moved from photocopiers to personal computers, then the internet, tablets, facial-recognition phones, and augmented systems, building futures our grandparents could never have imagined.
And yet, every day from arrival to leaving work, you still hold a mouse, tap a keyboard, and stare at a monitor. Same tools, same posture, same repetition. It is 2026, yet in many ways, we remain in 1995.
The technology evolved.
The tools did not.
Why? Because the machine does not want them to. Not really.
The mouse works. The keyboard works. The monitor works. They keep you tethered in one position, one posture, one predictable rhythm. Efficient. Controllable. Monetisable.
Once, we had paper and pen.
You could write anywhere – under a tree, in bed, on a receipt. Then came the typewriter, faster but still leaveable. Later fax machines and photocopiers – tools we used, then left behind.
But the mouse? The keyboard? The monitor?
These are different.
These are always on. Always waiting. Always asking.
You sit before them and boundaries dissolve. Lunch becomes desk food. Breaks become message checks. Thought disappears under constant clicking, responding, and notifications pulling attention without pause.
Your eyes stay fixed until the real world feels distant. Your neck bends forward in focus or submission, while the body pays quietly: carpal tunnel, eye strain, headaches, back pain.
These are not accidents.
These are the terms of the arrangement. The machine never promised comfort. Only efficiency.
But let me tell you something that happened recently in an office setting – something small, almost forgettable, but revealing.
A colleague needed a new monitor. Simple problem. So she did what the system asked of her. She went to IT. She submitted a requisition. She filled in the forms. She waited. Approvals. Back and forth. A loop of process that moved at its own slow, indifferent pace.
Hours passed. The problem remained.
I watched this unfold. And then I did something simple. I walked over. I looked at the actual issue. I found a spare monitor. I installed it. Five minutes later, her screen worked.
Problem solved.
But what stayed with me was not the solution itself. It was the contrast.
What if I had not been there? What if she had stayed inside that process all day, believing that was just how things must be done? And more importantly – why do we so rarely stop and ask whether the system we are following is actually the simplest way to solve the problem in front of us?
We move through our days like participants in a script. We follow the pathways already laid out. Click, type, submit, wait. Work. Earn. Repeat. And we rarely ask the question that matters most: why is it like this?
The Stoics understood something we have gradually forgotten. Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus – they taught that control does not sit in circumstances, but in response. Not what happens, but how you meet it.
Marcus Aurelius, seated in the most powerful position in the known world, still wrote to himself each morning. Not to control the empire or the economy, but to remind himself what was and was not within his power: only his mind, only his response.
A boy reads this and thinks: I have no choice. I must work. I must follow the system. In many ways, he is not wrong. The structure is real. The bills are real. The machine is large, and it does not bend easily.
But a man reads the same words and sees something else.
He sees that within every structure there are small spaces of choice – not rebellion or escape, but awareness. The choice to notice what is needed. The choice to walk across the room instead of waiting hours for approval. The choice to act directly when procedure no longer serves the problem.
In small moments, you can move the system instead of only being moved by it.
Here is the lesson at the centre of it all – the machine, the mouse, the money. The machine continues. The mouse waits for your hand each morning. The money flows through systems far larger than any one individual. These are realities, and they are not going anywhere.
But do not become smaller than them in your own mind.
Work will always demand your time, but it should not consume your awareness without question. Your job matters, yes. But your ability to observe, simplify and step back to ask whether there is a more human way of doing things matters more.
That is where your real leverage lives.
You are the one operating the machine. You are the one moving the mouse. You are the one, in quiet ways, shaping how things actually get done.
And when you understand this not as an idea, but as something lived and practical, something shifts. The urgency softens. The attachment loosens. The sense of being trapped fades at the edges.
The machine can take your hours.
But your mind, your awareness, your ability to step across a room and solve in minutes what the system cannot resolve in half a day – that remains yours.
No requisition form, workflow, or approval chain can take that away.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
