I Made Myself Lose My Phone
Beneath our dependency on smartphones lies a seething resentment at what our devices are turning us into
For Christmas 2018, I booked a trip to Thailand on a whim — keen to escape work and the annual family gathering. Nothing good tends to comes from hasty decisions. Jetting off to the other side of the world because I couldn’t deal with real life would come at a price.
Sure enough, soon after landing in Bangkok, things started to go missing. I left a copy of Lord of the Flies in a restroom, forgot to retrieve my credit card from an ATM, left a pair of earphones in a restaurant. This losing streak reached a peak when I misplaced two cellphones in two days.
The first was a recently upgraded iPhone 8, already cracked on the back. It fell out of the pocket of my swim shorts while I was riding a scooter from the beach. I got back to my room and noticed it was gone. The second phone, a battered iPhone 6 kept at the bottom of my travel bag for emergencies, disappeared in exactly the same way.
When bad things happen we tend to get derailed by emotions. I spent several hours feeling gut-punched, convinced of my own uselessness. But once the pity party was over, I started to wonder if there wasn’t a more profound explanation for losing all this stuff in such…
