Where’s your phone?
Most of us know where our phone is. At all times. Because usually it is right beside us.
What do you check most often? Email? Facebook? Surf the internet?
We’re addicted.
- We turn to our phones when we’re bored.
- When we want to know something immediately.
- When we need affirmation that we’re heard.
But our phones can’t give us what we really want.
They can, however, take it away.
True connection doesn’t come through a device. It comes through conversations and looks and gestures and meals and silence and tone and touch.
Used wisely, our devices can facilitate those things.
But more often, our phones take us away from true connection, not lead us to it.
They steal away our presence from the moment we’re in.
The Power of Off
See if you relate to this scenario by Nancy Colier in The Power of Off:
“These days, the instant something happens, we are immediately on our devices, texting everyone we know to tell the story of who we are, the story of our lives.
After the personal texts have gone out, we start posting on social media.
As soon as we are finished getting it out to the world, we start checking to see the responses coming in about it.
In a sense, the whole event, our life, takes place outside of us and on the screen; life is not something we live directly but rather something we use to establish our self-image and existence.”
Are we living life directly, or buffered by a screen?
How is this changing us and our relationships?
I’m bothered enough that I’m trying to change. I’m putting more distance between me and my phone. I’m leaving it in other rooms or keeping it off or refusing to check it as soon as I hear a beep.
It’s not easy. But it’s important.
Collier says:
“Paradoxically, leaving ourselves endlessly available results in our being unavailable to others and to life.”
I do want to be available to those who need me via my device.
But not at the expense of those who need me in person.
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Where is your phone right now? How connected are you to it? How often do you disconnect? Please share in the comments.
