I was born five years before the middle of the twentieth century, and in my lifetime, I’ve witnessed technology advance at lightning speed.
Nowhere has that advancement been more marked than in communications and how we get information. We went from vacuum tubes to transistors to printed circuits and computer chips, enabling us to communicate at speeds we couldn’t even have guessed at when I was a kid.
This has also, unfortunately, changed the way we view communicating and even our understanding and reaction to the passage of time.
When I was in my late teens, as a young GI posted overseas, I looked forward to weekly mail call when I would get my monthly letters from family and friends, especially girlfriends. A month or more between letters didn’t really seem like that much of a hardship.
Fast forward—and I do mean fast forward—to today, and young people are linked to their smartphones as if they’re life support devices. Actually, a lot of not-so-young people seem to suffer from the same malady. You can’t ride the subway and not see the majority of the passengers looking at the screens of their phones with glazed expressions.
I almost became one of those people.
In 2006, when I was assigned to a senior national security job, I was issued a phone called a Blackberry, which was a kind of handheld computer. Large, slow, and clunky compared to today’s phones, it allowed me to send and receive email, surf the Internet, and even do video conferences, and my office required that it be on and in my possession at all times.
I know many people who found that really exciting, but I wasn’t one of them. There was something about having a device that could intrude on my most private moments, like a morning walk in the park or when I was in the bathroom, that freaked me out.
I quietly rebelled. When I wasn’t involved in an operation requiring my immediate attention and wasn’t at work, I began turning it off. Over three years, there was only one time when the office tried and failed to reach me during non-duty hours.
When I turned the phone on and returned the ‘missed call’, it turned out not to be a real emergency, and they’d called the duty officer—which is what we did in the days before smartphones. That was the turning point for me.
Since that day in 2008, I’ve maintained a firm phone policy. Despite having the latest-generation phone—thanks to my daughter, who bought it for a birthday gift—when I’m at home, I keep it turned off most of the time, only turning it on in the morning to check overnight messages, at midday to catch up, and a final time at night before going to bed.
I’m a writer, and I teach online college courses, so I’m on my computer for much of the day. I check emails four or five times a day, which has proven sufficient to handle time-sensitive and emergency issues. Most people who know me don’t even bother trying to engage me in constant phone chatter, and the ones who don’t…I just ignore.
I offer this as advice to those of you who feel bereft and cut off without a glowing phone screen in front of your eyes. Turn them off, untether yourself, and get back in touch with all the life you’re missing.
Trust me, you’ll thank yourself for doing it. | NWI
