Smart Phones, Social Media, Netflix: Or Years of Losing Your Life Down Rabbit Holes

Seriously—we’ll look at each of these individually, starting with smart phones this week, but all three can be categorized as time sucking vehicles.  As you get out of bed in the morning, you think, oh I’ll just glance at the headlines on my news feed, 30 seconds tops.  Next thing you know, you’re late for work.  But let’s explore, shall we?

Smart phones.  These things have become like an appendage to our bodies.  We all know the outright panic that occurs when you accidentally misplace your phone or can’t remember where you left it.  And God forbid you leave the house without it.  You absolutely must turn around and go back to get it, no matter that you are thirty minutes in to your 60 minute work commute (pre-Covid of course). 

And then there’s the charging anxiety.  Constantly checking your battery life. 100% = yay!  75%= oh, ok, that’s still good, nothing to be alarmed about, 50%=hmm, getting low, half life here, 25%= oh shit, where’s my charger? Gotta get it charged.  It’s gonna run out.  When you hit 20% and you get that message that it’s going on low power mode to conserve battery, your anxiety is at a 10/10.

You madly text the person you are texting that your battery is low and you might lose them.  You scrounge your purse for your battery charger to plug in, or you’re smart enough to have an external charger and you hope you were smart enough to make sure that was fully charged.

I am old enough to remember when phones were just phones, not minicomputers you carry in your pocket. 

I can also remember when phones were attached to the wall and came with cords and you had to fight with your siblings for who got to use the phone and who took too long talking on the phone.  

And a busy signal.  Remember those?  If you were calling your friend, and her brother was using their phone, you’d get a busy signal. And worse, your friend would have no idea that you were trying to call her. 

It was super important to make sure that phone on your wall had a really long cord.  This was important because it needed to stretch far enough to another room in the house where you could maybe get some privacy to talk to your new boyfriend without your parents and siblings overhearing. 

And since there was only one phone for the whole family, remember the days of picking up the phone and if it wasn’t for you, yelling, to your sibling, “Hey, Richard, Eddy is on the phone for you.”  But you know you got to say hello to Eddy and catch up with him a bit before Richard got to the phone.  Yeah.  That doesn’t happen anymore. 

Then came the cordless phones.  The first ones were these big, bulky, walky-talky type things.  But the idea that you could talk to someone cordlessly, was astounding. 

Eventually, these babies got streamlined and we had thin, small cordless phones.  I was so excited trading in my bulky Nokia for the pink metallic Razr that was a flip phone.  Oohh!!  So cool. 

But cordless phones didn’t distract us.  They were a convenience that we used when we needed to make calls.  They were not altars of attraction to whom  we became slaves.  No. No my friend.  That happened with the introduction of the smart phone.

And lest you think or feel that you can not even remember a time that you did not have a smart phone, let me remind you the year the first smart phone emerged.  Well, the first affordable smart phone with internet connection—the iPhone emerged.  That would be 2007.  A mere 17 years ago.  I mean, that’s not that long.  I’ve lived most of my life without one.  If you are 35 years old, you’ve lived more than half your life without one.  But yet, not a one of us can imagine living our lives without one and can barely remember what life was like before one.

And now, you look around and you see everyone’s eyeballs are glued to their phones.  Groups of people who are together, are not in fact,  together.  Well, they are physically together, but their attention is not on each other, but on their phones. 

The texting, the pinging, the scrolling.  Human connection and interaction is under assault.  Perhaps this is part of the reason for our divisiveness today—none of us knows how to converse anymore.  All we know are how to send giphs, and memes, and texts. 

Our phones are also cameras so we are snapping pics right left and center. And of course, there’s the ubiquitous selfie.  Selfie.  There’s a word that didn’t exist 17 years ago. 

The one great benefit of the smart phone however is that, it has emerged as the tool to end all debates and arguments.  You and your husband are having an argument about whether or not Tom Selleck is alive or dead.  However, now, with the smart phone, that argument is history.  One of you simply googles it and can say, ‘alive’.  End of argument.  In that sense, it’s a real time-saver.

But the reality is, it is far more a time-suck than a time-saver.  Endlessly scrolling through various news feeds, social media, games, texting, google searching.  I know this.  I am aware of this.  But guess who is anxiously awaiting the new iPhone 16 that is coming out in the fall?