I thought my iPhone died, and I was happy.

A personal reflection on constant digital connection.

The other night, for about five minutes, I thought my iPhone died. And I was grateful. But first — oh, no! I panicked. My thoughts raced. How much will a fix or replacement cost? And more dreadfully, what will I do meanwhile?

But then that part of me that had once learned detachment from possessions, the one that gave away everything after college and only owned what would fit in the backpack I lived out of (and a couple boxes of nostalgia stored at my grantparents’ house), the one that sought attachment to the visceral, physical, face-to-face connection to other people, the one that adopted Dave Matthews’ “Seek Up” as a personal anthem — that part of me checked myself, took a deep breath, and then felt a great moment of relief…

Maybe it is dead. Maybe I won’t replace it.

Maybe I’ll finally get that damn constantly-connected monkey off my back.

The thought of no more iPhone, of no more any-constantly-connected phone in my pocket, it felt good. Damn good.

Alas, I then remembered the old iPod trick to simultaneously press the center and top of the dial to force a reboot of some sort. I tried it with the power and selector buttons on the iPhone.

It worked. The monkey was back.

“Apps this good, who’s got time to make friends?”
~ Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

Though this quote doesn’t literally apply to me, it captures the allure of a pocket-sized device that enables constant digital connection to the vast internet of everything. It’s that constant connection I have variously tried and failed to manage in as healthy a manner as I’d like.

Remember the days before the smartphone, or even the dumb cellular phone?

I do. I miss them.

I miss the days when a phone call was grounded, and when the times in between that grounded connection to others across vast distances were uninterrupted by a steady flow of calls, texts, updates, and now the nearly constant urge to open and check any variety of content feeds.

I miss calling my then-girlfriend from a payphone with a calling card while mostly in the woods for 28 days with so-called “at-risk” adolescents, the grounding tether to that phone, through a cord that I knew ultimately connected to her, where I couldn’t walk away from the conversation as it happened, where it required a deeper commitment to engage in and sustain the conversation than our current mobile talking capabilities require.

I miss the days when a run or a bike ride was privately known, measured only by either known distances or perhaps a car drive with a close eye on the odometer. Or, imagine this: a paper map. I miss the days when the struggles and triumphs of that run or ride were shared face-to-face or by voice over that grounded land line, rather than with an auto-post and requisite, seemingly automatic follow-up Likes and Favorites.

I miss the days when I’d run into or hang with someone I’d not seen for a while, and, “How have you been?” was truly a question to an unknown answer, instead of, “Oh yeah, I saw on Facebook that you ____, ____, and ____. Yeah, I liked that.”

I miss pre-connected boredom, kicking back to observe my surroundings, whatever they were, while pondering life’s questions.

I miss the oddly satisfying accomplishment of bored-reading the labels on a box of soap or a tube of toothpaste while sitting on the can, instead of swiping through my social and reading feeds (increasingly one in the same) while dropping the kids off at the pool.

I miss carrying Shambhala pocket editions in my pocket, my prior on-the-go-to read of choice. I miss their physicality, the comparatively contained spontaneity in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, the Tao Te Ching, or what I could draw from Merton’s beautiful spiritual meditations filtered from their religious constraints, and so many others I’d collected.

I miss the freedom to be unavailable, to not constantly know who is doing what, nor when and how, and the mystery of why left even more open.

I miss daily life unimpeded by SO MUCH NOISE, for it often seems as much energy as I invest in trying to filter down to signals in my feeds and reads, my mind is constantly awhirl, incessantly processing WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION!

I could go on, and on, and on. But I won’t.