I broke my smartphone and my life sucks anyway
When you will see, for the umpteenth time, the repeated Facebook post on “Sometimes you will never know the value of something,until it becomes a memory”, just stop there and read it, and not once but multiple times. Because it is true.
It was a normal evening of fun: just laughing, some beers* and a very big smartphone that, with me drunk, fell from my hands, crashing to the ground. These things happen, you can’t realize it in time , until you find yourself with a life without any notification. Just In a moment.
(*It was just water. I wanted to use a poetic license to justify my inadvertence.)
My OnePlus One had some flaws, but I really loved him, and managed to use it instead of my MacBook in case of emergency: he was simply there, inside my bag, and I felt cool. He soon became better than a business card: if you have a OnePlus One and you are a woman, and –furthermore– you bought it when you needed an invitation to access the store, you have to be a real NERD. I have gained the respect of all men that saw me using it, and every time I used to take my OnePlus One out of the bag, they had such wide open eyes and an unbelieving face, followed by a smile and some chats as we were usually among some old and nerdy friends.
End of the flashback.
Here’s the reality of a life without a smartphone: when it died, I went back home, placed it with me in my bed watching every cracks that warped the background photo, caressing the smashed Gorilla Glass 3 with some grains in my fingers. I saw my notification marked by the cracks and realized that I couldn’t reach them anymore.
I decided to stay two days without any smartphone or cellphone. I didn’t want to do any report on how hard is to live without a smartphone in our society, also because it would be a little bit complicated to understand all the pros and cons in a little more than 24 hours of “no-smart-thing-with-me”. On the other hand, it would have been useless trying to get my Nokia 3310 back from the grave: it would be like to buy a tamagotchi instead of downloading an app to take care of my virtual pet.
We should take all the disapproval on every smartphone owner aside and accepting the bitter-tasting truth: our world sucks because we suck, regardless the smartphones. We have to face this brutal news and keep it in mind, especially when we talk about how good life was before technology, before all of our heads bent on some little screen, before letting an app decide who we will date.
So I spent 48 hours watching my reality: my friends were too busy with their smartphones, so were people around me in a restaurant. And what were people talking about? “Look: she posted this on Facebook!”, “there it is, here is the video I talked you about”. Yes, the sunset is stunning, it is one of the things I love most of my town: you can see the sun diving in the blue sea, disappearing and exploding into multi-coloured shades of red, spreading and painting houses and streets. It is true that it needs no Instagram filter. It is true that we skipped most of the beautiful things around us just because we need to compulsively check our smartphones, but removing them from our lives, won’t be the solution to make us enjoy nature or everything else you’ve decided is better than technology.
In my two days without my OnePlus One some people asked me, with a naughty smile, if I finally realized that there was a world around me.
Well, yes, my answer is that I see this world. But it sucks. And with that word, I don’t mean that the entire earth is rotten and I don’t want to live anymore. My world, the reality around me, it’s not complete without internet. I have friends from all over the country, with different cultures, traditions; friends living far away from me, even people that I barely know but with whom chatting it’s so nice. I never get bored on internet. And I love it.
The other side of the coin is that internet plus a smartphone: that is equal to ceaseless notification. Sometimes push notification woke me up at night, writing “hey, why don’t you use me anymore?”, WhatsApp groups, Telegram groups, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Skype, Slack. Notifications swallow up our attention, interrupting us in the most aggressive way possible.
They do not “notify” anything anymore, they threaten us: open me, it’s important. You have to answer to this. If you don’t write now, your career will be gone forever. So here we are, waiting for a vibration, with our eyes focused on the led on our phones, just because we firmly believe notifications are the most important and necessary things ever.
We built smartwatch for this reason: we don’t have any excuses for not answering to that anymore, we don’t want to miss any of them. Whilst this is something natural, considering the fact that internet became an add-on of our reality (so one notification would be comparable to a “hey, are you listening to me?” in person), on the other hand we have two “worlds” to live on. And we should do some personal rules to that, like: “I am available from 8:00 am to 5:pm to this world, while I can answer to you from 5:00 to 7:00. But if I am going out with friends, I will not answer at all unless it’s a “life-or-death situation”.
This could be an etiquette for managing notifications from our smartphone. So we can –maybe– have a better quality of the time we decide to spend going out with friend/crush/people and do not spend the entire evening recording things/showing videos.
Living without a smartphone has taught me that it’s impossible to live without it anymore: it is not a simple phone, it’s not just “the net”. The smartphone became a personal object comparable with our ID card. It combines our personal data with the ones belonging to the people we care most. Inside of it there is our job, our photos, our voice chats, our social networks, our emails, our unique number from where we can make and receive calls, sometimes even a credit card.
It’s their screen we caress when we talk with our long distance girlfriend/boyfriend, it’s a work tool, it is the device that is keeping us a little close even if we are living on the other side of the world.
So how was the world without smartphone? It’s the same old shit. Having it won’t change the life around me, and neither will if I keep living watching it 24h per day. But if we can balance the two realities in which we live, it would probably make us more balanced. And to be balanced in 2016, according to motivational posts all around the web, it’s the right way for extreme happiness.
You can find the Italian version of this post here :)
