A while ago I saw a young family in the airport, a couple with their young toddler, who was happily sitting in her carrying chair thing. All three were looking down, scrolling through their phones with glassy eyes, not speaking to one another. We see this a lot, of course, but this was the first time it really occurred to me how different things are now than when I grew up. I didn’t have a mobile phone until I was in my late twenties. My fourteen-year-old godson just got one not too long ago. But the next generation, like this baby in the airport, will never know what life is like without a device. This raises a couple of questions: What does the future hold for this baby? And can she already beat me at Candy Crush?
We can all agree that airports are the worst, and a tough place to entertain a fussing baby. And presumably the parents were doing something important and would return their attention to each other and their baby in a moment. Probably the baby was sitting there learning to speak Mandarin or monitoring her stock portfolio. Even so, there’s a checked-out, drugged sort of look we get when on our phones that’s different from the look we get when reading a book, or even just staring into space. I get that look too, and when I catch my own reflection, it gives me a chill. It’s like Gollum’s face just before he drops his Precious in the water.
The people I know who use social media and dating apps do so because they’re trying to connect, stay in touch, and in some cases find someone to go out with or maybe even to fall in love and start a family with. In fact, this family in the airport was quite possibly formed by these advances in technology, and now, thanks to the wondrous connectivity to which we all have access, they had finally achieved their dream of finding each other—but they were still sitting in the airport scrolling through their phones. And this is just the beginning. Where will we go from here?
When my sister meets her work friends for dinner—a group of super-high-level New York business types—they sometimes do the following: everyone places their cellphone in the center of the dinner table, and the first one who can’t take it anymore and goes to reach for their phone has to pay the bill. Fun! When I’m driving somewhere, I’ve started to put my purse in the trunk of the car to prevent myself from checking my phone at a stoplight. I think games like this are necessary until we figure out how else to resist the temptation to click on important breaking news stories while driving, like “Ten Cats with Surprisingly Human Faces!”
Or rather, I think it’s all probably fine! Let’s make a date to see each other and then spend twenty minutes scrolling through hundreds of photos looking for that one we just can’t find! Let’s not wonder about one single solitary thing when we can just Google it over appetizers! Let’s leave our phones out on the table “in case of emergency,” but respond to all the non-emergency texts anyway! It’s just what people do! I’m totally okay with it! It’s that crazy Old Lady Jackson who thinks it’s weird, and she wrote you a letter on actual paper to give you her thoughts:
My Dearies:
I miss car keys. Those unattractive fob blobs they use now don’t hang well on my key chain, and my gentleman friend is always forgetting to give them to the valet. What, you think Old Lady Jackson doesn’t have the occasional suitor to escort her to a nice sushi dinner once in a while?
Please, please, sit down. No, not there, dear, that’s for company. Have a cookie, you’re too thin. Is it cold in here? What was that? Speak up, dear. I won’t keep you long, I know you’re busy. Let me tell you a story. One day, that horrible Marion from next door “invited” me to one of those group online thingies where we keep track of our steps and see who has the most—you know those? You do. Of course you do. Well, for a few weeks, I participated, and I thought it was the most wonderful thing. Such a sense of accomplishment at day’s end! So I started counting absolutely everything, and got all these wonderful apps: I counted not just how many steps I took, but also how many hours I slept, how many calories I ate, how many followers I had on Facebook, what the weather was like in Hawaii, how my retirement stocks were doing. I got a countdown app to remind me how many days I had left to shop for my nephew’s birthday. I got an app to track the constellations in the sky, an app to record how much money I spend at Starbucks, an app to remind me to water my plants, another that reminds me when to order more contact lenses, and one that tells me how many times I’ve listened to Doris Day sing “Que Sera Sera” this week. Isn’t progress wonderful? I got an app to read what everyone thinks of restaurants too. This one was confusing to me, because it seems every single restaurant in the country is just horrible. But anyway, I especially loved the steps app because I could look at the thingie marker, and if Marion was getting ahead of me, it would make me jump out of my chair and wave my arms around to get my count higher. I beat her so many days that I could almost forget all the times she hid my trash bins and stole my Sunday paper. Bliss.
Then my gentleman friend and I were home one night drinking prune juice with vodka and binge-watching The Waltons, and apparently I was getting up to check my phone more times than you can say “Good night, Jim-Bob.” Finally my gentleman friend paused the VHS tape right on John-Boy’s face and asked me what it was that was distracting me. And I told him it wasn’t at all that I was distracted; I was just excited by all the wonderful new information that was coming in, and did he want to see the weather in Hawaii or join our step club too? No, he said, he didn’t. And then he asked me a question. “Why?” he said. What was I going to do with all this information? Why keep track of so many things? And why did I keep marching around the living room waving my arms over my head? What did it all mean at the end of a day, or the end of a life, for that matter? (When you’re our age you think about these things, dear, but don’t worry yourself about it just now—you’re still younger than you think.)
Anyway, everything suddenly went topsy-turvy and I had to sit back down on the davenport. Have another cookie while they’re warm, won’t you? My story is almost over. I had to sit down, because I suddenly realized what a waste of time it all was. I take my walk every morning rain or shine—who cares if Marion goes a little farther? I water my plants when the soil looks dry, and I haven’t forgotten my nephew’s birthday once ever. In fact, I started to think about my nephew and all the time he uses that phone, always checking for likes on that Instacart. It’s good to be bored in the car, I always tell him. Spend some time with just yourself and your thoughts and nothing to do. How else will you learn who you are?