I’m a freelance producer, so if I’m out in the field and miss some key correspondence, an excuse of “well, you see, my phone usage, it became a bit much” would merely be an efficient way to make sure I am never hired again. That felt good too but it didn’t work either: I kept on bouncing between my apps, checking the damned New York Post.Ĭould I just chuck the damn thing in the ocean? Or just leave it at home? Alas, that really is the stuff of fantasy. It felt really good but it didn’t last long.
In the midst of the all-consuming, politics-driven death spiral that is the US today, I shut down all notifications. And maybe knees that tweet.Īnd so I began looking for balance. Maybe future humans will have legs that ring. I have found myself wondering if this is a matter of evolution. More troubling is a sporadic buzzing I feel in my leg, which feels like a phone ringing, when the phone isn’t actually in my pocket. I’m with my kids and I’m still touching the phone. I’m crossing the street, I’ll stop and look at the phone and have no idea what’s going on. Where’s the phone? Is it charged? Should I charge it now, or later? At work or at home, notifications buzz me like low-flying planes. A bulbous chunk of my brain, sucked up by phonethink. The reach for the phone had become involuntary. Of course it should have been obvious long ago, but on that revelatory night, I realised I had lost control. All it takes is a slim distraction and my thumb turns turbo. Baseball stats, flight status, email check, text, random article, who knows what. My usage is heavy, best described as a zigzag, across apps. When they made it really fast and put it on a phone, it was pretty much game over. “Is this what we’ll do for the rest of our lives?” “Is this how it all ends?” I wondered out loud.
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