#188: Me and my phone
Last week I spent 20 hours and 38 minutes on my phone.
I picked up my phone a total of 552 times, on average 79 times a day.
I spent just under 8 hours on WhatsApp, 4 hours on Safari, 2 hours on LinkedIn, 2 hours on Gmail and 1 hour on Duolingo.
I find these numbers and this startling reality very difficult to stomach.
I see this sheer amount of time and I feel a bit of disgust and revulsion.
I am upset with myself, that I’d spend that much time on a little black mirrored super computer I have in my pocket.
I’m frustrated at my lack of restraint, how my right hand flinches towards my pocket, or turns over my phone “just to check” in a moment of frailty.
I check my phone when I am bored.
I check my phone when I am avoiding doing something else.
I crane my neck into the endless pit of my phone when I’m disengaging from the world around me.
I go on my phone to numb myself, to mindlessly scroll my way to another place, the one I’m not in.
I repeat the same old patterns, visit the same old places, looking for the same old thing I never find.
Me and my phone, we go way back, we have a lot of history. We’re in a relationship, you know. A very complex one. We’ve been together about 15 years, we met when I was at school. We were both so different back then.
I need it, I know that much. I talk to my friends, I do my work, I connect to the world.
I love my phone. It’s an incredible piece of technology.
I go to a new city; check uber, load up city mapper, find my flight tickets. Let’s go.
I wake on a Monday morning. I say hello to my friends and family, do worldle, check my emails and calendar all in 10 minutes whilst in bed. Let the day commence.
It’s not all bad with me and my phone. We love each other, I know we do. It’s just… complicated.
Nobody forces me to go on my phone. It’s not an abusive relationship. I am complicit.
That’s what makes the screen time numbers hard to see. I know I’m in charge and I know I can’t control myself.
My phone is a powerful mirror into my own psychology.
My phone shows me my insecurities on instagram explore pages, lets me easily over-work and let’s me fall down those News rabbit holes I get myself in.
My phone sits there willingly, letting me go wherever I want in the world, letting me explore the depths of my own psyche, letting my unconscious tendencies play out before my eyes.
My phone is a portal into who I am, the dark, the light, the good, the bad, the ugly.
I feel confused about my phone.
Twenty hours on a piece of metal and glass in a week.
I could be learning a language! Oh wait, I am… on my phone.
I could be spending time with my friends! Oh wait, I am talking to them on WhatsApp…
I could be working! … I am.
I can do anything on my phone. It’s pervasiveness is the problem. I use it for everything, with no boundaries.
I marvel at it’s capability and all the good this technology brings to my life. I can’t see a world where I don’t have a phone, I might fantasise about an analog existence, but it’s just that, a fantasy. I don’t want to go backwards to a world without this supercomputer in my pocket, yet I want to move forwards in world where I am not beholden to this device.
What I can see is the barrier to the world around me that my phone creates.
I can’t see a perfect set of rules for how we must all engage with our phones. Yet I do see choice.
A choice to willingly engage with the world through a small screen, or engage in the world in another way, possibly a bigger way, a more intimate way, a more real way.
My phone encourages volume and plentiful connections. Yet it doesn’t always encourage intimacy, it doesn’t encourage in-person, full bodied, face to face human contact.
It might be called FaceTime, but it’s not really, it’s more screen time.
My phone may open the whole World Wide Web up to me, yet it makes my real world around me smaller.
I realise that my phone isn’t a portal into the world, it’s a portal to the internet. It connects me to the online profiles of my friends, not their person as a whole. I see now how my phone makes it easy for me to mistake the internet for reality. It’s a virtual reality.
I’d like to be on my phone for about an hour a day. I’d like to use my phone for research, navigation, entertainment and communication.
I’d like to notice when I want to pick it up, when my hand twitches. Am I reaching out to connect or to disengage? I’d like a conscious relationship with my phone.
Right now it feels a bit toxic, or dependant. I can’t quite place the right word, it definitely doesn’t feel quite right.
My phone is a great phone and a frighteningly good mirror.
I’ve had one for 15 years and I’m still working out how to use it.
Cheers,
James x
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