Photo by cottonbro studio, from Pexels.com.
The first verse of the first Psalm contains a dire warning about sitting in the seat of the scornful: don’t do it! I’ve taken this warning to heart now that I have an iPhone.
You may ask: what possibly is the connection?
Well, to be frank, I’ve sometimes sat in the seat of the scornful when I observe the way strangers, family and friends clutch this device, maybe in the way pious women used to clutch their rosaries. But I never realized until I misplaced mine that I, too, am heavily dependent on the thing for my sense of connection with the world; losing track of it (yesterday it somehow landed in the garbage) left me in a panic. And yet it was not too long ago when landlines were all I had, but since I never carried one of those phones anywhere, I was not so aware of my dependence—and it’s been a long time since I “waited by the phone” for some essential-seeming call.
But now with this cell phone permanently strapped to my body—the only way I can be sure I won’t drop it or leave it somewhere—I am chained to connection and to what seems the unavoidable need to respond at once to every call…
Isn’t this a kind of slavery? Well, if it is, I am in good company. I no longer know anyone who is free of it.
I’m convinced that for every loss of time and privacy there’s a gain, but in this case, it’s hard to fathom what it is. I don’t really believe the device will save me if I’m hiking in the mountains; there’s almost no reception there, which is a great mercy. And most of the friends who call me are not going to be much bothered if it takes me all day, or even two days, to answer them. Most calls are not that important anyway.
But here it is: my underground faith in the importance of every connection, strapped to me in a little fanny pack (actually a tummy pack) around my waist. Am I somehow a better friend, lover, relative, grandmother, mother because of it? I doubt it. And does it contribute somehow to my work? I don’t see how.
In the New Year, I’m going to attempt something radical: one day in the week I’ll leave the thing behind. Will I panic?
I was hoping there would be a string of Comments on your piece saying that cell phones aren’t necessary. Much less a good thing. There are people who have not swallowed the cell phone hook. I was perfectly satisfied with my land line, all along the years. Then, this past March, the corporate entity which owns the apartment building where I’ve lived the last ten years decided to renovate the building’s apartments. The cheapest products and methods of planning were used. The methods and products are hazardous to health and immediately did serious damage to my good health. Because what the owners were doing also uprooted all of us in the building, I saw that I would have to switch to a cell phone. I can tell you, I did not want to, health hazards in themselves that cell phones are. So I got the least expensive flip phone from the supposedly older-people-friendly company, and have had to take the body-harming thing around with me in a bag in a rolling cart I use to carry things I’ll need each day.
I had to find places to spend time during the day, for the chemicals being released by the toxic products were doing such harm to my body. I came back to the apartment only to sleep. Even so, I found that I had to spend weeks somewhere other than the apartment, to lessen the damage to my health all I could. If I can ever find a health-safe place that I can afford to move into, I can’t wait to go back to a landline. I wonder, though, if it will be some form of a cell phone instead of a hard case instrument of much lower radiation, that sits on a table like phones used to do.
You are right, Sallie. Most calls are anything but urgent or need to absolutely be answered right when the phone rings. I, for one, do not want the high level of a cell phone’s electrical energy present anywhere near me, much less right by my body, in a pocket or plugged into an ear. Really, people. What were you thinking, to accept being tied into such a situation? First, computers, then cell phones and the cell phone towers (another health hazard that causes deadly body problems and diseases), then “smart phones” and “games”, on and on. The makers and sellers of all addictive products know exactly how to design and market them to a public that does not examine sales pitches for the effects of the products on themselves and the earth. I wish all people who see through the current health-harming and addictive products (of any kind) would refuse to buy them, and would demand, in the case of phones, actual landlines. And wouldn’t it be great if phone booths were brought back?
Well, I know that, given how hard it is to get men (and sometimes a woman) to let go of something they are making money from, and for the addicted to move away from addiction, none of this is at all likely to happen. So, for myself, I do what I do. What a lot of us used to do in regard to production and purchase before The Computer Conquest. I buy what is well made and healthy and, if I can’t find it, I do my best to do without it.
I can’t wait for the ordeal of The Owners’ “Renovation” to be finished in a month or two so I can reclaim at least this one telephone corner of health in my life. Whether I can find a place to live with actual hardwood floors or floors of linoleum made of linseed or tile is another ugly problem — vinyl and laminate flooring (and glues, when used), and carpets also made with toxic materials, are also health-damaging products being sold to the public in the same way electronic products have been foisted onto the public, with the health hazards not being revealed.
Being older (at least, in years counted by number) and knowing that death waits not too far ahead offers one benefit, at least — leaving this patriarchal world and the non-feminist population which has been so bumfoozaled and contaminated as to make it uninhabitable. I remember the scene in an old, black and white movie in which men, harnessed like oxen to the spokes of a huge horizontal wheel trudged, heads down, shoulders slumped, around and around, endlessly turning the wheel for The Master. This is what life is like, with everyone bound to the progeny of computers. At least I will not have to endure for long “life” in such a world, as younger people these days will. How can they stand it? Well, because they don’t know any different. But we older ones do know. Makes it hard, sad, to me.