Don’t Hate Your Phone
You can hate your phone for being a source of all your tasks and frustrations and things you’d rather not do. And it can also be a source of joy. Like now: reading a book, taking a brief note on the go. (Without it, this text would have never been written. The thought would disappear like innumerable ones that haven’t been written down.)
The phone is thought about mostly as a source of all evil. That’s right, we live in a hyper-distracting time, and the phone which is always by our side, if not in our hand, has the capacity and the notifications to distract. Which it perfectly does. The blame is of course on us, a gadget is just a gadget after all.
Right now, switching from reading a bunch of articles to writing this note, I feel nothing but joy from owning and using my iPhone. No, it’s not an iPhone ode, but it’s the ode to our time, and to the technology it provides.
This was an ultimate gadget from my childhood. I constantly organized and reorganized things on my desk, and numerous notebooks were nothing but a collection of revered things, a shrine. Today, I have everything. Here are the things I most often do on my iPhone:
- Take notes, tag them, search across them, re-read them.
- Keep track of to-dos
- Listen to music
- iMessage/Whatsapp/Facebook Messenger
- Read Twitter / save links to Instapaper (or Reading List)
- Read Instapaper
- Read books (I usually read from Kindle, but the times when I don’t carry it with me, I sync with Kindle for iPhone)
- Check the weather of course!
All this, from a phone. There still are moments when I just go ‘whoa!’ — simply because all this, all mine!
Now, with the announcement of yet another iPhone and Apple Watch (called by everyone nothing other than iWatch), things might change even more, adding a bunch of other things. But the point remains: I love my phone not for what it is, but for what I do with it.
It’s good to remember that you own your phone, and not let all the functions own you.
