Redefining My Relationship With Technology
Current State
When did we become slaves to our phones? I use my phone too much. I don’t even realize I’m doing it, I just do it. I will be eating dinner with my girlfriend — an activity I want to be fully engaged in — but there’s a constant itch to check why my phone just buzzed in my pocket. I’ve slowly been realizing how invasive our phones are. Our phones default to 24/7 distraction mode. I have had to put in the work to tune notifications to my liking, but I can’t do it anymore. I’m turning my smartphone into a dumb phone.
I was recently at a Childish Gambino show and he told a crowd of people: “Put your phones down. Don’t commodify this moment…this isn’t a concert. It’s an experience.” Our phones are now a lens to live life through, and I can’t stand it. I didn’t take my phone out that entire concert, and I may not have the entire concert recorded on my phone like the 15 year old in front of me, but I loved every f*cking moment of that concert. I cried. It was a beautiful experience that I will never forget — and I don’t need a phone video to remind me I was there.
Social media is amazing, but I hate it. More accurately, I hate how much I love using it. Social media has made the world an incredibly small place and let to so much good — a sense of community and belonging for so, so many people; but it can also be an echo chamber of hate and vitriol. Unfortunately, the hate often outweighs the truly great parts of social media, but it takes work to cut out the hate. It’s always there as a nagging distraction. There’s always someone to correct or a conversation to jump into. I have spent a lot of time fine tuning my Twitter to be a place of positive and creative people with similar passions as mine, but it can still feel like a perpetual hate engine.
There’s always a tweet, an instagram post, a new sports score, a crossword to solve, a video to watch, a news article to read, and whatever else we have installed to pull at our attention — our phones are portals to a land of infinite distraction. I’m tired of living a filtered life. I’m tired of being distracted. I want to go back to giving myself breathing room. I want time to think. I want to reclaim my time to work on the projects that I’ve been putting off for the proverbial “someday.”
2019 is the year that I give in to biology. I know that sounds strange, but I have always been resistant to it. I use screens until the moment before I go to bed, I drink coffee like it’s water, I am not mindful of my diet, but most of all I do not have a solid sleep schedule. Homo Sapiens have existed for a couple hundred thousand years, but we have made more technological advancements in the last couple of centuries than we did for the first tens of thousands of years humans existed. Technology has evolved faster than we have, and now I am going to be more aware of that. All of our monkey brains love the positive reinforcement after a post gets a like or two, but it really loves the endless scrolling timeline that is always there for us.
It is not practical for me, or any of us, to cut technology out of our lives completely, but I am making the decision to be more mindful with my usage starting this year. I want to figure out a way that lets me share my experience and be a part of an online community, but I am tired of it distracting me from living life in the real world.
I’ll be updating this throughout the year.
