How to live more wisely around our phones Flashcards
The dark truth is that it’s become very hard to find anyone more interesting than one’s smartphone.
These delightful gadgets bear a hidden cost.
Addiction is dependence on a substance that keeps our real hopes and fears at bay: it is any and every routine we deploy to avoid a fair and frank encounter with our own minds.
We are addicted to our phones not because we rely on them, but to the extent that we recruit them to a harmful project of self-avoidance.
The concept of a digital Sabbath isn’t Luddite in spirit; it’s not denying that technology brings us enormous advantages or is dazzling in its accomplishments. It’s recognising that we are over-obedient to our machines. We’re too compliant by nature and therefore need to be reminded – with the utmost authority – that we must at points take a break.
Often it’s not more information we need but more ambitious use of the information we already possess. What makes for a genuinely enjoyable holiday? What, really, do I love about tennis? What do I need and want to say to my friends? The only instrument to use is our own brain.
Our phone, however, is docile, responsive to our touch, always ready to spring to life and willing to do whatever we want. Its malleability provides the perfect excuse for disengagement from the trickier aspects of other people.
Dating: We become monsters of our own hopes: any person we have met is judged against those we haven’t ever met. We are unforgiving towards those we know because of the vast reserves of surely ideal companions and partners currently separated from us only by a click or two.
Of course, none of the people we do meet through our phones is in fact ever quite right. So we go back to the search and redouble our efforts. The treasure-mate must be there, if only we look for long enough.
We never do find them though – and for a tragic reason that our phones will not as yet own up to. Everyone out there is radically imperfect. The task of love can’t be to locate some mythical ‘right person’. Compatibility is an achievement of love, it can’t be its precondition. We’ll have learnt how to form relationships only when we surrender our attachment to perfection.
Our phones never ask us never to forget our ego – and the endless things that ail us.
Instead of losing ourselves, we simply keep asserting our demands and appetites. We record rather than retire the needy, insatiable self. And as we post the images of the perfect sunset over the distant hills, we are forgetting (as we update) what they – quietly and with great and tender majesty – might really have been trying to say to us.
Our most urgent need is for something that for millennia was of little concern to us: calm. We react to stimuli even when we’re exhausted, worn down, over-agitated and frantic. And our phones have to accept a degree of blame – because they are the endless carriers of claims to rouse us, when what we really need is exactly the opposite: to be helped to be more serene and at peace.
Poetry is the smart name for an eternal, central task: to sum up a lessons of experience as briefly and memorably as possible.
We shouldn’t take against brevity out of snobbery. We should just make sure we’re using brief media to say the really big and important things.
Keeping up with the news sounds like one of the most serious of rationales for our devotion to our phones.
A lot of what happened is in fact entirely irrelevant to what we are trying to do on earth.
The real news for us today might be that we should probably give our mother a ring.
There is a rather different list of things we might not get round to enjoying than the one our phones want us to focus on: getting to truly know our parents, learning to cope well with being alone; appreciating the consoling power of trees and clouds; discovering what our favourite pieces of music really mean to a friend, chatting to a seven year old child… I
It’s not the notion of missing out that is the problem. It’s our ideas of what we might be missing out on that counts – and that our phones unhelpfully skew.
For all their brevity, ‘liking’ and ‘friendship’ speak right to the heart of who we are. We are lonely creatures – though we might know plenty of interesting people. But others never quite know us exactly as we’d wish to be known. The most elusive – that is the darkest, most complex and most lovely – parts of who we are remain isolated.
Our momentary excitement when we get a message isn’t shameful or ridiculous. It’s a widely shared, yet secret, pang of hope: that our inner solitude will be pierced, that our troubles and joys will be truly understood by another; and that all the messages we wish to send to the world would be received and perfectly understood, at least by someone.
We need reminders to keep appointments with ourselves: we need to spend time with our own worries, to understand them rather than just suffer the anxiety they create.
The grandest (and much the worst) is our final appointment: with death. We don’t know how many days we have left to count down.
But what we need reminding of is not the day and the hour but the fact. Ideally we’d get a message every morning: Remember you are made of dust and and will be dust again.
Brevity, sadly, is the key to appreciation. It is when we remember death that we understand properly the urgency of making the best use of the days that remain.
We are still so far from inventing the technology we really require for us to flourish; capitalism has delivered only on the simplest of our needs.
We can summon up the street map of Lyons but not a diagram of what our partner is really thinking and feeling; the phone will help us follow fifteen news outlets but not help us know when we’ve spent more than enough time doing so; it emphatically refuses to distinguish between the most profound needs of our soul and a passing fancy.
In the Utopia, our phones will be wiser than we are. They will be kind and not merely subservient. They will know how to edge us away from a stupid decision and how to summon up our better natures.
We deserve pity for having been born in such primitive times.
