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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 quick succession.
The uneasy, immature, and overwhelming relationship we have with social media is at the heart of the conflicted feelings we have toward our phones.
Smartphones are, of course, powerful gadgets that have allowed us to do things which, just a few years ago, were unimaginable. But they have also become the gateway to social media, a place that has made a great number of us increasingly unhappy over the years. In an effort to fit in, most of my posts felt forced, out of character for who I was in real life. Every time I found myself on a bus or train somewhere, scrolling without a purpose, I knew I should be doing something better with my time. There was a war going on for my attention, and Twitter and Facebook were winning.
