Lessons From a Lost Phone

A Reflection on a Balanced View of Modern Technological Advancement

Yesterday I was scrolling through Instagram or YouTube, or Facebook or maybe X, I really can’t remember, and I came across a short that was captioned, “What we used to do before the internet.” It was a compilation of a bunch of silly things that kids used to do and probably still do when they are bored: flicking the door stop to hear it buzz, stabbing an eraser and other such things. The video made me stop and think for just a moment. Had we really lost something precious in the age of the internet. I tend to be of the opinion that people choose their own fate, and they are clearly choosing not to destroy erasers but rather to lay on the couch watching short form content to stave off boredom. I think that most of the time critiques of modernity are cynical and foolish. I mean don’t you think some people were nostalgic over their hunting and gathering lifestyles when we began to farm. Or there was some old grandpa who sat on his ancient front porch complaining about how much better growing up in caves had been than houses. But in the grand scheme of things when we look back on old technologies and ways of life we almost inevitably choose the more modern things over the old ones because they are better, after all people have been choosing to make wheels for untold centuries but I’m sure there were a few old farts who preferred to move their wares to market by packing up a heard of goats long after the wheel was invented. But this logical critique was not really the reason that I scrolled past that short before it had expired. The real reason was that it made me feel just a little guilty. And I did not like that feeling so I shut it down as quickly as it had come up. I was off of that thought and on to the next amusing thing the algorithm had served up for me.

Even to myself, however, none of these modernist arguments are a defense against moderation. Last semester I ceased watching any form of social media almost completely, or at least greatly diminished it, so that I could focus on the things in my life that mattered more like the dating relationship that I was in at the time, a couple of friendships that I cared about, my schoolwork, my spiritual wellbeing and my job. I think that fast was extremely helpful to me, even as I saw the end of that relationship and saw some of those friendships go through rocky straits. Even still, over the summer I had allowed myself to pick back up the old habits of endless scrolling and entertainment. And at the beginning of the current semester, I found myself desiring to once again leave that habit at the door so that I could focus on the aspects of my life that matter more than my amusement. But it was hard to quit. I stopped for a day or two and then made some silly excuses and went right back to flipping between a concoction of social media sites and genres of entertainment. And yesterday was no different.

That is until the evening when a friend of mine dropped me off at my house and after shutting the door behind me I reached for my left front pocket only to find it empty. I had left my phone in the crevasse of my friend’s couch. I called my phone 8 times from another phone but no reply. I searched my pockets again, now somewhat franticly. I walked back out into the night to look for my phone under the light of the amber streetlamps. To no avail.

Once I had accepted my fate, I went back inside to make my midnight snack and then to turn in for the night. There was no video to accompany my snack, nor was there any entertainment to lull me to sleep. But rather than being met by boredom I was met in my own head by myself. My own thoughts were there to greet me and to talk to me. To leave them behind or to run from them now took more effort than simply pulling out my phone and watching a YouTube video. So, I sat with them. They were not exactly what I had expected. There was still pain from the aforementioned strained friendships and there were still some anger and lust that I had not dealt with. When I woke up in the morning, I was just naturally more productive. I got ready without my constant stream of amusements, and I was out of the house much earlier because there were just less distractions to hold me back. I went to a coffee shop right as it opened and had a pleasant time doing homework, reading my bible, meditating and praying. Then it was off the retrieve my phone. As I went to get it, I realized that I was not missing much from it, I could still send texts through my iCloud on my watch and laptop, I could still wake up in the morning with the help of my trusty alarm clock. I do need a smart phone for work, but in my everyday life the phone operates much more like a distraction or a portal to give me an easy break form the difficulty of life rather than its nominal function of communication. I often like to send texts on my laptop anyway.

It is easy to use an anti-luddite argument to excuse the use of our smart phones far beyond what is good or helpful to us. But when I think about the functions of my phone that I take advantage of versus the functions that I would like to be primary, the disconnect is vast. In my experience, a modern overuse of entertainment is often the germ that spawns more sin and shuts out real reflection. Laziness, brashness, and lust among the most prevalent sins for me, though really any sin could be encouraged if that is what you are taking in and being entertained by. Jesus says that if our hands cause us to sin then we ought to cut them off because it would be better to enter glory without a hand than to go to hell with our body intact. If this is the case for the body, then how much more ought it to be the case for our phones. If social media causes you to sin my brothers, cut it off, for it is better to enter heaven bored than to enter hell amused.