I Broke My Phone…On Purpose
I was standing in my apartment when, feeling frustrated at everything, I threw my phone down. I picked it back up and saw the screen was cracked in half, where it briefly flicked on and off before it finally going black. In that moment all my anger, which had been building up for days, seeped out of me. I felt my body relax. I was free.
I had been feeling this undercurrent of anger all week and a lot of it was directed at my phone. I realized how aggressive I had been with this poor, abused Samsung. I was chucking it on the counter, tossing it recklessly into my bag. I think I even yelled at it once or twice (I live alone so I can get away with this). It wasn’t the phone itself causing me grief — in fact, for all I had done to it, it worked surprisingly well — but there was something about the phone that was triggering me. I didn’t realize what it was until I saw the Android breathe its last electronic breath: this phone had held my brain hostage. It had been a tyrant, reigning over my mind so much that I felt alienated from my own opinions and beliefs. Breaking it felt like I’d been unplugged from the Matrix, but where the real world was so much sweeter than the artificial one.
Because turning it off didn’t seem to work. Today, we use our phones for everything. It’s not just social media and text messages anymore. Our phones play our music, control our lights, measure…