This story is more personal and
requires a bit more of an explanation.
I live in Bayside, Queens. Every
week I go into the city to work out at my gym in Manhattan. Some time ago – I
forget when – I decided to forego the locker room and just wear sweatpants and
a sweatshirt on my way there.
My sweatpants have pockets which
I close with a zipper. In my pockets I carry everything I'll need for my day in
the city: my wallet, my keys, my prescription and of course my iPhone.
About a month ago I was doing my
workout and at some point my phone felt out of my pocket. I noticed this while
I was still working out. But because there have been days in my life when I
leave the house without my phone and don't notice until I've been outside for a
while, I made the assumption that this was one such day. I even mentioned this
to someone else working out and he said: "I've been there."
So rather than look for my phone
I completed my workout and then started to go home. This is a long process: I
had to take the subway, I got lunch at Penn Station and then I had to wait for
a train so it took nearly an hour and a half for me to reach home. Again I need
you to keep this in mind.
All the way home I expected to
find my cell phone on my bureau drawer in my bedroom where it is almost every
day.
Now at this point almost everyone
who is under thirty and the vast majority of readers may genuinely think I'm
some kind of extraterrestrial. Some I suspect lost me with the title: "How
could he possibly lose his phone? Doesn't he have it surgically
grafted to his left hand like me?" (Please don't tell me if any of you
have actually had this procedure done.)
My long-time readers, however,
will know this is part of how I generally view technology in general. I didn't
get an iPhone until 2021 when my cell plan was going to run out, I haven't
updated it since I got it, and I didn't update my iPad until six months ago
after a long rant on this blog in which I related the difference between a
convenience and a necessity. In it I said I use my cell phone to make and
receive calls and every so often use one of my apps when I can't get to my
tablet or my computer. And that's still the case.
Now that being said when I got
home and couldn't find my iPhone, I did in fact go into a complete and
utter panic that went between hysteria, frustration and rage and sometimes all
three at once. But it wasn't the franticness of a Gen Z or a teenager who can't
function for five minutes without posting something on social media. Nor was I
terrified if I was going to lose all of my personal data.
No this was the worry you have
when you lose something expensive and you don't want to replace it if you don't
have too. If I had lost my phone it was going to take me awhile to figure out
how to replace, then get my data, then figure out who to get it to work, and
all of that was going to take an immense amount of time, energy and money to do
so. There was all the issue of how I was going to do most of this without a
phone in the first place as at this point I had yet to figure out how to get my
iPad to make and receive calls in the few months I owned it. I need to be clear
that even as all this was going on there was a part of me that could see the
humor in this. It almost seemed liked the 21st century equivalent of
a Zen koan: "Who do you call to find your missing phone?"
It didn't take a genius to figure
out my phone was almost certainly still at the gym where it had fallen out of
my pocket. The issue was how to confirm this. I spent and wasted nearly an hour
trying to figure out if there was a workaround before biting the bullet and
leaving my home and walking roughly two blocks to my neighborhood pizzeria. A
friend of mine works there and I asked them if I could use his phone to call
the JCC where it was and see if they'd found it. He was a gentleman and said
yes.
After one minute, I got the
answer: Yes it was there in the lost and found. And now I'm going to lose those
of you I've already lost because what I did next was a decision none of you
would make.
I had two choices: I could go
back into the city which was going to take at least an hour, pick my phone up
and then spend another hour going back home. My entire day would be wasted. Or
I could go home, take a nap, spend the next few hours unwinding, go about the
rest of my night in an orderly fashion, then get up bright and early the
following day and go into the city and pick up my phone, all while gambling
that anything that was vital to me would be picked up on my email and my iPad.
Well, I went home, took a nap for
about an hour and a half, played video games, did some writing, watched
Jeopardy, ate dinner, wrote some more, watched the premier of Line Of Fire, went
to bed at midnight, got up at 7 AM and went into the city. My phone was there,
and there were almost no text messages and no calls of note. I charged it and
went back home, knowing that in good time I would be telling my followers of
this 'harrowing experience'.
I would wager all the money I
have or will ever make that there isn't a person under 21 that could have made
the same decision or gone into a catatonic state had something like this
happened. Yet when I discussed this experience with my therapist that day and
indeed everyone who knows me, they were all able to laugh about it with me and
were impressed how well I handled it.
Now if you've read my articles
you know how much I truly believe that the fact that this generation lives its
lives on its cellphone is responsible for the vast majority of the problems
society is going through. I've already made the argument that so much of what
we use as apps or other internet usages are conveniences – things that make our
lives slightly easier – rather than necessities – things we need to survive –
and that the biggest problem of this generation is that they genuinely believe
everything regard technology is the latter. They say this even as they argue how
technology is destroying everything around them, particularly Silicon Valley,
and they will do so while using the cell phones these companies make to post
comments on the social media sites they founded all while using the apps they
invented to get everything vital.
I've argued time and again that
so many of the problems that young people and/or left leaning ones have is that
they view every situation as a binary choice between two absolutes. I suspect
that this is true in regard to all things Internet and Silicon Valley related
and to them there are only two ways to see it: Either you are a complete and
utter slave to technology or you live entirely off the grid with no access to
at all. None of them will admit that they can't exist even a moment without the
horrible things technology has given them. And because they can only see these
two extremes they spend their existences moaning.
But like everything else there is
a middle ground. We're even starting to see signs of it among the young people
themselves with the so-called 'dumb phone movement' and the way that in quite a
few states – including mine – the government is having cell phone bans while on
school grounds. I approve of both of these ideas as steps in the right
direction for the next generation and considering the former is basically
coming from millennials and Gen Z is one
of the first signs of growth among them that gives me reason for hope.
As someone who's spent his entire
life arguing for a middle ground throughout every part of society there are
many things you can do. I'm not saying you should cut the Gordian Knot and just
complete get off social media altogether – though I'd honestly think everything
in the last decade would be the biggest argument to do so – but at the very
least you could reduce what I'd call your 'internet footprint'. I'd argue you should come in with a specific
amount of non-work-related screentime – perhaps between an hour to
ninety minutes – and limit yourself to that.
That's essentially where I am
right now. As I've mentioned the only social media site I'm on is Facebook and
almost of that is about publishing my columns on that site for some of my
friends. I spend quite a bit of it on Medium itself and the rest is divided
fairly evenly between some entertainment sites and eCommerce ones. There was a
period six or seven years when I spent much of my late nights doing a primitive
version of doomscrolling on my computer, and that often ate up an hour of my
nights. I managed to essentially cut myself off from in the aftermath of the
2024 election – almost all for my own mental health - and I really haven't done in a year and a
half or so. It wasn't easy but it was doable.
Now I'll confess that this may
not be as easy for someone like me, in their late forties, and someone who has
been given a cell phone as a toddler. But given the rise of the dumb-phone
movement, it's encouraging to know that some people do admit it’s a problem.
I'm not saying you have to give
up your streaming services or throw Uber in the recycle bin or that you should
stop using eBay. I am saying that I'm been regulating my use of that as well. I
will spend some time browsing on both Amazon and eBay but I've made the
decision to only make one set of bulk purchases per month on each site
and trying to limit the cost of my purchases to about $100 per month. Don't get
me wrong; I still buy groceries on this site every week but I've always spent
far more time buying food and drink at the brick and mortar convenience stores
and restaurants around me.
And while I do watch a lot of
streaming shows on their services I still will buy DVS copies of individual
seasons of streaming movies and when shows that are from streaming such as Max
or Paramount Plus run their episodes I tend to watch them when they air either
in marathons on HBO or on Showtime itself. I've used my DVR to record entire
seasons of shows when marathons take place and then watch them at my own pace.
Part of this, I'll admit, may be my own quirks but considering how many
streaming services are now going back to dropping an episode a week I
think they've acknowledged there's a market for it. (Considering that I've read
over the last few months that there's been an increasing desire for physical
media I'm glad to know I'm not alone on that anymore.)
None of this requires you throw
your phone in the sewer and going to Montana and start a compound. It just
requires figuring out the difference between a convenience and a necessity. I'm
not per se saying it will make your life happier but when two of the main terms
for people who spend their lives on social media and phones are 'doomscrolling'
and 'bed rot' it would seem to argue even they're acknowledging they're not
exactly living their best lives using them.
All I'm saying is: maybe turn
your phone off tonight. Go to your nearest supermarket and buy a frozen dinner.
Buy a DVD player and watch Deadwood. Get
a record player and buy an LP of Adele. And maybe consider taking Instagram,
Twitter, and every other major app off your phone. I mean, when was the last
time a tweet or photo from any major celebrity or politician did anything but
send you in a spiral? Hell, it'll piss off Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk more
than anyone of your tweets and hashtags ever did. And I'd think that would be
reward enough.
Now if you'll excuse me, my copy
of Dexter: Original Sin on DVD just arrived and I want to put in my
collection. I think I'll put it between my copies of Season 1 of Fallout and
Seasons 1 and 2 of The Bear. (I'm sorry, I just wanted to blow the minds
of some of my readers with that fact.)
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