Children today will never understand life without experiencing the reality of the phone
By Robert Scucci | Being published
Whenever I had a conversation, it was almost immediately cut short by finding a smartphone faicly in finding, and it’s the worst experience you can have when trying to get to know someone. With what I like to call “early moments,” Newle Chit Chat is how you learn about people while covering a variety of topics. The topic itself is irrelevant, but the idea behind it seemed to show how the human mind works through their anecdotes and experiences.
These days, anyone can pull out their phone, throw out a stat, throw out what they think is the right answer, it quickly kills the conversation because there’s nothing left to check. If it feels like we’re getting a little overwhelmed by our own humanity whenever curiosity is fueled by data, blame the inventors of the smartphone.
Life is more than looking for the truth and the right
No one in their right mind would argue that easy access to information is a bad thing, and I agree. When you need to make a serious, informed decision, start researching. We’re lucky to live in a time where you can check for symptoms before calling your doctor or checking how much air pressure you need in your car’s tires. That kind of information is cut and dry, valuable, and easy to justify. There is no argument here.
However, the true discovery of the smartphone brings out our shared sense of what makes us human: curiosity and shared experience. Imagine the last time you sat down with friends it was a casual, off-the-cuff conversation. How much does a cloud weigh? What would happen if you ate nothing but jellyfish for a week? It was Dax Shepard or Sam Rockwell In Seven psychopaths? Their hair and wrists are the same, and their voices sound the same. With those hangouts, when you’re trying to pass the time and live in the moment, why does anyone need to be right?
Before we had instant access to the Internet, you had to rely on logic and curiosity to find answers, even if they were wrong but logical but made up of logic at the moment.
Details kill creativity
Having resisted this change in technology until 2019, when I finally gave up using a Flip phone, I quickly discovered that I am a smartphone addict. If it were up to me, I’d still be rocking my LG cosmos with 3 full keyboards and a crappy camera. If something piqued my curiosity, I would write it down in a small notebook I carried with me (yes, I was one of those people). When I got home, I would sit at my computer and research research if I had an idea I wanted to develop. More often than not, the dead ideas in the book were very interesting. But when they were developed with imagination and not research, I knew I had struck gold.
The truth is unfortunately that the price of basic phone plans has gradually come in until it makes more sense to just get a data plan. The hardest transition for me was my professional life. Although it is not a technical requirement, accessing e-mail, production boards, slack, and record servers is becoming part of my daily routine, and I could not navigate my work without a smartphone. I couldn’t beat ’em, so I joined ’em.
At the same time, I fell into one of the biggest creative slumps of my life. One of my favorite things in life has to be boredom. So bored that I am compelled to do something about it to make my time on this earth feel more rewarding. That’s the same kind of boredom that’s used to dominate conversations when you’re just hanging out with friends and shooting the breeze. Hypothetical situations were created, plays were invented, and songs were written. Movies were actively watched, not simply playing in the background while we all sat in our corners slumped over. Shared spaces felt more alive. Now they feel like new places to separate themselves again.
We are never bored anymore, and that street used to be the birthplace of everything interesting.
We don’t learn about each other like we used to
Most of the conversations I have these days, even if they are mild, involve someone calling their phone like a quick mcgraw in fact to check and end the conversation. But the dialogue itself is always more interesting.
Pre-smartphone road trips were full of good conversation because a random billboard or site sign would spark a thread of questions. That left the silo next to the cemetery. Was it a dumping ground for direct serial killing? Nope. Google says it is used to store grain, but the land was bought, and soon it will be a walmart. Silence.
There was a time when fragments were used to pass the time, when people analyzed ideas as much as they could into knowledge and information. Now, those opportunities are disappearing in the name of knowledge. Anyone can look at a think piece on medium or punch a question to quora, but that’s not attractive.
Instead of celebrating each other’s logic and worldviews, we reach for quick answers that lack humanity or depth. More compelling is hearing how one arrives at the answer, right or wrong, because the colors themselves are included. That natural and anecdotal thread helped us become more intimately intelligent. And when conversations get heated, it’s easier to see where someone is coming from instead of saying they’re wrong; They don’t hide behind numbers, they show you who they are.
The next time you’re at a party, dinner, or moving around the living room, resist the urge to find a smartphone. Lower your intelligence, ask probing questions, and stay in the moment. We used to talk to understand each other. Now let’s check the victory. Maybe it’s time to let go of righteousness and start looking for it again.
