Life with a Phone Sucks

Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

Before my slow, skidding descent from the moral high ground, there was a time when I wasn’t addicted to a phone. The exact type to ask an elsewhere texter if the art of conversation was dead and scoff at every vacant, tone-matched reply. 

In silent protest of a carriage-full of stooped commuters, I heaved over one of the pages of War and Peace (Tolstoy), I actually read. Passing my eyes across the same line, again and again, unable to take in anything more than the considerable heft of my own book smarts, there for all to see.

“I don’t have a phone,” is how, as a person who didn’t have a phone, I would introduce myself. As oh-so interesting as not owning a phone is, once you’ve oh-so interested people with your no-phone-owning persona,  you’ll never see them again, because…

Nouveau-Luddite-chic wasn’t the real reason I stayed un-phoned so long. Until quite recently, I couldn't keep hold of anything more valuable than boogers pocketed in spots too fancy for flicking. Certain that a robust handset was the key to impressing girls, one year I bounced 10 off dance ceilings and floors, until each met the fate of its ten-pound predecessor.

To be phoneless today is to die loveless, childless, and friendless. With the few remaining acquaintances only notified when your dead-face floods their timeline. When not having a phone became more hassle than having a phone, it was time to have a phone.

It took a little while to become one with the Object Latterly Known As The All-knowing Rectangle Of Wonder. At first, I was pecking away at it, asking others for help, but getting all the gritted frustration of your average inter-age tech walkthrough. 

Turns out, syncing up your surroundings with an app is really easy. Way easier than a crude map, carved into the back of a receipt with a stuttering biro. My estimated chance of arrival shot up. 

For a while, I still asked people what the weather was like, instead of just opening up a window and looking for myself on google. My one-man crusade to save the payphone industry lost momentum, and my phone grew on me, until it was me. 

6 Months Later 

Before my first thought forms, I grab for it like a wounded soldier would their genitals. First up, let's beam a succinct wrap-up of the world’s chaos into the sanctity of my non-marital bed. Ah that’s better.

At the breaky table, I once swallowed some light annoyance when my girlfriend’s attention drifted to her other other half. Now the moment she cracks, I’m relieved I can get a headstart on my endless checklist of non-tasks for the day. 

As I’m pushing a spent joke, she’s fawning over some micro-influencer’s calorie-restricted child. As she’s getting through her deferred response, I’m taking stock of inbound emojis and judging my human worth accordingly. Always accounting for how thrifty the sender is dolling lols out. After all, one man’s :L :L :L is another man’s ha.

A thoughtless pause later, I assume the gist “Yeah, that’s true...” After a lifetime wasted unitasking through one-sided convos, I am every dad humming from within the sports section. I don’t even sound like I want to sound like I’m listening.

Gone are the days of smirking at you pocket-patting phoneys, decrying your feeble attachment to the material. If I mislay my it on the sofa, a paternal panic dumps my heart through my guts. 

The phone’s not lost, I’m sure it’s almost certainly been abducted and the window for seeing my first and only phone with battery life again is narrowing with every sec- oh, here it is, embedded in the same doughy flank as 20 minutes earlier. 

With no tolerance and a narrowing attention span, I snap up every dangled morsel of clickbait. One pleasing swipe away from my home screen waits a slurry of digestible content to chow down on at every lapse.

A reheated take on a podcaster’s offhand comment dragged out into a deep dive into nothingness. Click. A blog knotting a string of keywords together for the reading pleasure of algorithms. Click. An arse-rag tabloid immortalising the errand of some latter-day jabroni. Click. 

Sometimes it’s nice to switch off and look at things, like a dog watching the Eastenders omnibus, but normally I’m well aware I’m not even enjoying it, also like a dog watching the Eastenders omnibus. Although a Sunday morning trip to the loo phone-in-hand is the pinnacle of the human experience, fiddling about on a phone requires and gives nothing. 

The phone is a never-ending challenge of my self-control I can't be bothered to override all the time. Even the exemplar irony of writing about phone-jonesing isn’t enough to stop me reach for it mid-thought. Goddammit, I love the little bastard.