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\u2019t many) are in that camp with the rest of us.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got rid of my iPhone!\u201d 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. \u201cI\u2019m not using a smartphone at all any more!\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cI\u2019m okay … Am I okay?\u201d tone that I found depressingly relatable. <\/p>\n
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, \u201cThings will settle down after next week,\u201d every Sunday night until you die of old age, overwhelmed and with an incomplete to-do list that has \u201cdie\u201d still left on it, not crossed out. Things aren\u2019t settling down \u2013 ever \u2013 and your relationship with the phone is not getting healthier or more within your control.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0The way I use my phone feels compulsive. 20 minutes can pass like nothing at all. It\u2019s a profound waste of timeOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Really, it\u2019s going the other way. That\u2019s clear from the obliteration of everyone\u2019s attention span and banjaxed nervous system.<\/p>\n Parting ways entirely is a deep impracticality in this era \u2013 we use phones to pay for things, to access bills and bank accounts and work emails. We don\u2019t 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\u2019s no time to think \u2013 there are 12 billion dancing videos being released every 30 seconds and there\u2019s The White Lotus finale<\/a> to talk about. <\/p>\n My friend\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s all here to stay. It\u2019s all speeding up.<\/p>\n Things will not, under any circumstances, settle down after this week.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s 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\u2019t scroll endlessly on TikTok or worry about already-thin celebrities using Ozempic if you\u2019re a unicellular organism.<\/p>\n My point is that going cold turkey creates as many problems as it solves.<\/p>\n We\u2019re two messages in and I\u2019ve already contemplated death, life\u2019s inherent sadness and my own professional inadequacies<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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\u2019t an option. I can\u2019t get a dumb phone and pretend it\u2019s 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\u2019 social media and think, \u2018Ah yeah I\u2019d happily live in Cork. Everyone loves Cork.\u2019<\/p>\n 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\u2019t raise my cortisol levels to \u201cYou\u2019re being chased by a bear\u201d status. <\/p>\n It\u2019s the time difference. The messages come in while you\u2019re sleeping and because you\u2019re 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cJust FYI Albert from down the road died. Very sad,\u201d might be the opening salvo. I\u2019m 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\u2019t even had a pee yet.<\/p>\n \u201cHow\u2019s the book writing going?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n We\u2019re two messages in and I\u2019ve already contemplated death, life\u2019s inherent sadness and my own professional inadequacies. I stuff the phone under my pillow and won\u2019t look at it until, mindless automaton I am, I pick it up again six minutes later.<\/p>\n We\u2019ll definitely be grand.<\/p>\n It\u2019s just about management. <\/p>\n\n
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