Few of us have a healthy relationship with our phones. Chatting with a writer friend recently, I realised that even the people rejecting the ubiquity of smartphones (and there aren’t many) are in that camp with the rest of us.
As we sat outdoors on a crisp autumnal Australian day, the sun hitting my back and its 23-degree heat calming my bones, she ruined everything.
“I got rid of my iPhone!” my friend said, staring at me over a cup of coffee with unsettling ocular intensity. The irises of both eyes were entirely ringed in white as her brows crept northward. She looked like a skittish horse being backed into a stall. “I’m not using a smartphone at all any more!”
Her voice ascended at the end of the sentence with a weird little laugh, like a panicked question she was putting to the universe. The whole thing had a sort of tremulous “I’m okay ... Am I okay?” tone that I found depressingly relatable.
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Trying to get on top of the stranglehold these devices have on us is a perpetual and ultimately futile endeavour. The digital equivalent of saying, “Things will settle down after next week,” every Sunday night until you die of old age, overwhelmed and with an incomplete to-do list that has “die” still left on it, not crossed out. Things aren’t settling down – ever – and your relationship with the phone is not getting healthier or more within your control.
Really, it’s going the other way. That’s clear from the obliteration of everyone’s attention span and banjaxed nervous system.
Parting ways entirely is a deep impracticality in this era – we use phones to pay for things, to access bills and bank accounts and work emails. We don’t have time to think about how easy these convenient features might make a dystopian government coup in a cashless society where none of us remember our own phone numbers. We need the phone to contact friends and family, to enviously stress over the social media feeds of colleagues we worry seem to be doing better than us. We need them to feel relevant; to feel poor and fat and behind and boring in comparison to influencers whose prodigious use of image manipulation can only be rivalled in its marketing savvy and propagandist vision by Joseph Goebbels. There’s no time to think – there are 12 billion dancing videos being released every 30 seconds and there’s The White Lotus finale to talk about.
My friend’s cold-turkey relationship with her now discarded smartphone is no healthier, really. It comes from a place of psychological bombardment, hyperstimulation and existential angst. It’s an admission of being so addicted to the technology that you need to simulate a lifestyle that is 20 years out of date just to get through the day. Everything is digital. AI is now more articulate and better at thinking than the average person, and we cannot be arsed to write down all our passwords when our phone can just remember them, no matter how stealable this makes our already insecure data. It’s all here to stay. It’s all speeding up.
Things will not, under any circumstances, settle down after this week.
So it’s just about management. Gripping on with white knuckles. Trying not to be pitched, spiralling, off the edge of reality while podcasters suggest that Domestos is a good natural sunscreen until the wheels fall off the whole thing and we reset at amoeba level. You can’t scroll endlessly on TikTok or worry about already-thin celebrities using Ozempic if you’re a unicellular organism.
My point is that going cold turkey creates as many problems as it solves.
We’re two messages in and I’ve already contemplated death, life’s inherent sadness and my own professional inadequacies
As an Irish emigrant in Australia who works from home, writing in part about being an Irish emigrant in Australia, a detoxified digital lifestyle isn’t an option. I can’t get a dumb phone and pretend it’s 2003. I need to stay up to date on whatever preposterous gobshitery is going on at Leinster House this week. I need to check what book Ryan Tubridy recently recommended and to see which short-lived theme restaurant is taking over Dublin. I need to look at photos of Cork on friends’ social media and think, ‘Ah yeah I’d happily live in Cork. Everyone loves Cork.’
I also need to stay in touch with my friends and family at home, and must attempt to do this in a way that doesn’t raise my cortisol levels to “You’re being chased by a bear” status.
It’s the time difference. The messages come in while you’re sleeping and because you’re a mindless idiot droid who is addicted to your phone, the first thing you do on waking at 6.30am is roll over, coughing like an elderly man, and look at your phone. It’s automatic. It precedes conscious thought of any kind, and is, I think, the most depressing confirmation of our total capture by the digital reality in which most of us spend worrying chunks of our waking time.
When I grab my phone on waking, it is late evening at home. People have sent their queries or their news during their wind-down time before bed, and I awake to a tumult of anxiety and stress.
“Just FYI Albert from down the road died. Very sad,” might be the opening salvo. I’m then pulled back to memories of Albert, and an unsettling cogitation on the merciless march of time and loss of connection in the modern world, and I haven’t even had a pee yet.
“How’s the book writing going?” goes another, which causes an anxiety spiral as I anticipate bashing my brains against my desk to try to get anything decent out of there during the working day ahead.
We’re two messages in and I’ve already contemplated death, life’s inherent sadness and my own professional inadequacies. I stuff the phone under my pillow and won’t look at it until, mindless automaton I am, I pick it up again six minutes later.
We’ll definitely be grand.
It’s just about management.
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