Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it. I am the Lord your God.
Observe my Sabbaths and have reverence for my sanctuary. I am the Lord.
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high.
But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands
then I will do this to you: I will bring on you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and sap your strength. You will plant seed in vain, because your enemies will eat it. I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you.
You will eat, but you will not be satisfied.
You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters. I will destroy your high places, cut down your incense altars and pile your dead bodies on the dead bodies of your idols, and I will abhor you.
I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins. Then the land will enjoy its sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. All the time that it lies desolate, the land will have the rest it did not have during the sabbaths you lived in it.
It took me a long time to realise this, but my roof disappears, often. I mean, the sky has been vanishing, all my life, during football games, and while I was threading a needle, and studying for an exam. It disappeared almost every time I went inside. And then the sky would appear, and the grass would be gone.
I have had the great privelege, more times than I deserve, but fewer than I would like, to have both the grass and the sky.
My phone, recently, has robbed me of my ceiling. It’s terrifying, really. I’m not an anti-phone nut, any more than the next person. I’m not here to write a medium article about the horrors of smartphones, there are enough underqualified pseudopsychologists swarming the internet under that very banner, gathering like crows before war. No, phones are just newspapers.
Phones are just newspapers but better. People don’t read real books anymore, they just read these damned newspapers. People don’t attend symposiums anymore, they just read these damned novels. People don’t go into the desert and become a hermit anymore, they just attend these damned symposiums. Blah blah blah, the world is crumbling and corrupt, unlike how it was in the past. Boring.
No, phones aren’t evil, and there is no such thing as a smartphone addiction. I mean probably not.
Do you know what happens when my alcoholic friend stopped drinking for a day? Shakes, nausea, extreme distress. Do you know what happened when I, someone who has certainly been severly “addicted” to my phone at times can’t access it? I get bored for a bit, I feel uncomfortable, and then I get over it, pretty quick.
Phones are a way of putting off uncomfortable feelings. It doesn’t matter if that’s boredom, or sadness, or unhappiness, hunger, etc. They’re a maladaptive emotional regulation tool.
They’re just good at what they do. “Attention Spans Are Getting Shorter!” Nah. Distractions, under the great and terrible engine of optimisation that is capitalism, are optimised. Distractions have simply improved. What is easier than dealing with discomfort? Distraction. And we each own a glass and steel device which the world’s richest people spend hundreds of billions of dollars on to make them better at distracting you.
And so, my ceiling disappears. It’s a fascinating sensation, once I realised it. The world really zooms in. It closes down, and these 6.75 inches of glass become the world. The bed disappears, the world disappears. We’ve all experienced it, but the strength of that sensation has impressed itself upon me anew, because the sensation itself is invisible. the sensation is nothing, in the way that a shadow is nothing. Everything else (despite what I may have jokingly said) does not dissapear. It’s just that the phone super-appears. That spotlight of attention is so powerful.
Once upon a time, I couldn’t feel my heartbeat. Some portion of my readership will puzzle (as I did) that such a thing is possible. Not feeling a pulse on a wrist, or your heart hammering after a mile run. Just sitting there, reaching out with your awareness, and…feeling it. Interroception, is the technical term. I just couldn’t. Never had, beyond those examples of high levels of exertion. And the other half of my readers will be confused (as my partner was when I told them about this) that I couldn’t feel this. It’s like saying that I’ve gone through life without being able to feel my toes. Through several months of focusing into my body, extended breathing exercises, immense focus on myself, searching for that heartbeat, I found it. I can now sit down and simply find it, with fair regularity.
For some people, meditation does not fix them. It’s presented by many as a universal panacea. Focus on your breathing for 10 minutes a day and your depression, anxiety, and erectile dysfunction goes away! Except, for some people, it makes them more anxious. A dear friend of mine would vomit every single day before school, from anxiety. If she’d spent 10 minutes a day focusing on her breathing, I think she might have collapsed in on herself and turned into a very nervous black hole. Recently, she had a panic attack, and she hyperventilated so much that her body went into spasms from a lack of oxygen. I think that wasn’t a moment to focus on her breath. In fact, it was only when a friend (who was a nurse) came beside her and told her that this was a normal side effect and that she would be fine, that eventually the spasms receded.
This extensive and meandering aside is just to highlight the power of attention. The power of that spotlight is immense. So when a phone super-appears (it wouldn’t be a pretentious essay if I didn’t invent an arbitrary term and try to make it a thing) it does so effectively. Really, the phone isn’t doing much. Actually, when the phone super-appears, it’s 3.7 billion years of evolution, in which mammals eventually adapted with such dependance on brain power that we changed the way we walk, and grew these massive skulls, and started spending years developing (as opposed to the giraffe, who’s up and walking about 10 hours after it is born and falls 2 meters to the ground). Our attention is immensely valuable, it’s been honed and honed and honed.
The phone isn’t a drug. It just gives us things to focus on, and then keeps giving us things, and it gives us to them again and again, and we choose to keep focusing on them. Because at the end of the day, after a million YouTube videos about willpower, and after a million words written into librarys that only post-graduate students will read about the philosophy of free will, the fine-tuned focus-engine called the mind doesn’t care. It focuses on things, because that’s what it’s brilliant at.
When the only tool is a hammer… We have hammer minds, and rich people have figured out how to make a million nails for us to slam our heads against, repeatedly. As long as we pay them. Sure, as a consequence, we happen to ignore most non-nail problems…
I’m afraid that I ran that metaphor into a reef somehwere.
That said, the experience of being sucked into the phone, of waking up and seeing the whole world dissapear, has been very affecting to me.
I am a barista (oh you don’t need to pretend you’re shocked that the person who runs this unsuccessful blog serves people coffee for a living, it’s pretty funny actually). I am a barista/waitress really. Most of the time, I’m taking orders, managing tables, etc. A marvelous exercise in focus and attention, carrying in my mind 20 different timelines, who needs what, managing a constantly shifting priority matrix for the dozens of things I could be doing at any one time. Table 10, 13, and 20 all need clearing, but they’ve only just finished, so I should set 15 first, because the next table’s coming in two minutes, and refilling the ice bucket is constantly at the bottom of that list — until it runs out. I cast this broad net of awareness over the whole room. The moment a fork drops, or someone finishes their food, or sits back and closes the menu, I notice. It’s my job to notice. (I’m not saying it’s rocket science, but it requires a very particular mindset).
And yet, that feeling of time dilation, of the world narrowing, of the world collapsing into a single moment in space and time, it happens there too. When I make 2 lattes, and Americano and a cup of tea for table 14, there is nothing else I can do. My back is to the restaurant, and I am trapped, for those three minutes. Hot drinks are always at the top of the priority matrix. Even above serving food, or seating tables. And when you’ve started steaming milk, you have about a minute to serve it before all the microfoam pops and the cappuccino collapses into a soggy mess.
Something about this collapses one’s attention. You cannot notice anything else. You may not notice anything else. There is a quick calculus of how to most efficiently create these three drinks the fastest, with only one functioning steam wand and one and a half functioning espresso brew heads. There is a spacial seperation. Time slows down. Two minutes feels like ten.
I find it profoundly stressful. I also find it profoundly stressful to be behind the till, ringing in orders, printing bills, taking payments. That isolation, that break from the flow on the floor of the restaurant. It freaks me out, because it traps my attention. Zoe, whom I work with, loves it. She can do every job better than I can, but she just loves to be behind the bar, making coffees, working the counter.
What’s really interesting to me is that all the sensations when I realised how sucked into my phone I’d been after three headache-inducing hours of YouTube shorts brainrot were familiar. They were the same sensations as making two lattes, an americano and a cup of tea for table 14.
I am the best barista there. But the very focus that makes me a killer barista is the exact same thing that sucks me into the distraction singularity.
Real labour can be substituted for a bundle of desire, for the desire to have desire. Instead of acheving something you want, and your brain recognising it as success, you have something else. The endless firing of reward neurotransmitters without ever needing the actual success.
Phones just cut out the middle man, and they do it well.
(Well, you could say it is success. It is the greatest triumphant revel of evolution that I can spend hours upon end doing nothing, exerting no energy, taking no risks, eating the food that’s just there, in an environment controlled for optimal temperature, moisture, and shade from sunlight. Of course, we don’t optimise to please evolution, because evolution is not some sentient moral agent, with heirarchies and teleologies, it’s just organisms optimising for their environments).
Do not make idols.
Observe my Sabbaths.
Else.
you will flee even when no one is pursuing you.
You will eat, but you will not be satisfied.
I will pile your dead bodies on the dead bodies of your idols
Then the land will enjoy its sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths.
We chose the idols of our destruction. We chose the destination for our corpses.
The land will have its sabbath. Land will lie fallow. If an angry god does not open the floodgates to hordes of Assyrians, the land will eventually die without rest. Trust me, there are thousands of years of humans absolutely depriving fields of nitrogen that attest to this.
Chose your distractions. Chose your attention. Rest. There is no such thing as attention span, or willpower (probably), but being tired is a discomfort, and when we are discomforted, we distract ourselves.
Know thyself. Depend not upon thyself to fight distraction, for you fight your very self. Remove distractions before they arrive. And then chose other distractions, for you will become distracted. And I don’t think you want to live in a world utterly devoid of distractions, not really.
