When the phone was tied with a wire – humans were free…

Never has a statement ever been so true. I have recently noticed just how bad the first world’s collective addiction to phones is and how much it has poisoned society. I must first disclaim that although I am writing this as if I am on some sort of Nokia brick high ground and not a culprit of this epidemic, do not be fooled! This is as much a note to self as it is to the unassuming reader. I find myself deleting Instagram daily, only to redownload it an hour later because my thumb misses the natural progression of tapping on the app as soon as I pick it up.

That was very sad to admit to myself and commit to paper. Because if we gain a morsel of perspective, the whole thing is so sad. It is so sad that when having a drink with a friend, if one of us went to the loo, the other would pick up their phone in less than a second. It is so sad that when having conversations now, it is very much the norm for someone to just go on their phone while another person is talking. It is so sad that at many a mealtime, there will be as many phones on the table as there are people. Our phones now have such a grip on us, that they are constantly in our grip, an embarrassing extension of ourselves, as permanent as a pinky finger.

It is such a shame that so many conversations now begin with “have you seen that TikTok?” or “you know that meme with…”. I was on the tube the other day and a carriage full of teenagers from the same school got on. They were all sitting with each other but may as well have been in different cities. For 20 minutes, none of them looked up. They didn’t chat to their own friends let alone a friendly stranger, and I couldn’t help but think that if it had been 20 years before, what a different sight and sound that carriage would have been.

A favourite catchphrase of the 45–70-year-old population is the god-awful “in our day, we didn’t have phones, you see? Didn’t have satnav, did we Melanie? If we made a plan, we stuck to that plan because we couldn’t text to cancel last minute, could we?” And then they might segue into the “that’s why your generation are so flakey” lecture, but I digress. The irony is, it is this genre of adult who are the worst of the lot. And they represent the unfortunate combination of fascinated yet incompetent, making tasks such as flipping round the camera on FaceTime appear as difficult as cracking the enigma code.

I could go into the horrors of social media, its effect on mental health, its fakeness and perpetuation of perfection-- bla bla bla, but we have all heard that one before so I don’t need to go into it again. The point I have been skirting around is what are we all doing? And how have we let it get to such a point where, by definition, antisocial behaviour has become an integral non-negotiable cog of modern civilisation. I always hear people blaming the ‘technological age’. We talk of our phones as if they have a sort of autonomous power to run our lives. We don’t seem to understand that we do have a choice in the matter. You do not have to download your whole life, your calendar, your wallet, onto it; those were perfectly fine when they existed as things which took up physical space and it shouldn’t be radical, quirky or silly to not have them all on your phone. A terrifying fact is that if your average screentime throughout your life is four hours a day, you will end up spending 16 years of your life on your phone. When I heard that, I literally froze because there has been many a time when my screen time has exceeded four hours, and I know so many people who would consider that to be an acceptable if not decent amount of time to be on your phone each day.

So, my new year’s resolution is to use my phone as little as possible, only using it if it makes that specific moment better and conducive for fun. Having done a few weeks of this new attitude, I have come to realise that the moments that my phone does contribute to the moment being more fun, are few and far between. Without this attitude, and I know this sounds dramatic, I will waste my life and while away the hours falling into a very sad trap indeed. Whilst TikToks and reels do often make me sniff slightly harder out of my nostrils, 16 years is a very long time.