Living On the Fringe
On the ubiquity of modern technology & why I'm getting rid of my smartphone
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Seven years ago when I decided to attempt bicycling across the United States I was unknowingly setting out upon a path of liberation, not merely of the body (ironic in itself because of the great physical effort involved in this act), but of the mind. With what I deemed my necessary belongings strapped to the bike I said my goodbyes to my parents as they stood on the porch of my mom’s Cathedral-like home, then rode away in the grey downpour of that May morning. That was the beginning of my entrance into the world of minimalism, by dint of the fact that I simply couldn’t carry much with me atop that aluminum frame.
Though I didn’t quite realize it at the time, I had set out in search of adventure, and a new life better than the one I’d known. I was desperate to find a home, to find satisfaction, companionship, purpose — to find myself, some might say. I thought that a change in geography might yield something of value, that I might find answers along the road. Yet what I didn’t expect was that the real transformation provided by that trip would be a change in my perspective, an evolution of my way of seeing the world that would lead me down more roads than merely those I would travel on two wheels.
That trip, and others that would follow, were the result of a weighty longing for depth that I’ve carried since I was a child. It pushed me out onto Highway 52 on a bicycle; it carried me around the country in my old Jeep and landed me in Arkansas; it brought me to Australia and took me down the coast and back; it has been a driving force in my gut for years, and has pushed me to do things that stung like onion peels in my eyes. The desire for life, abundant life, and a rejection of the norm for the potential of something more, something better.
My travels thus far have been formative experiences, yet were made possible by my willingness to do difficult and often painful things. This, it could be argued, is part of the human experience, part of what it means to be made of dirt and divine breath.
I have a tendency to be on the fringe. Not too far out, just enough to push the boundaries a bit and challenge what is accepted. Usually when I look outward and notice the trends and the patterns of my peers, of most of the Western world, I feel an instinctual repulsion, my hackles go up and I assume something must be a little off, something has been missed, deliberately ignored, maybe even intentionally hidden. Though in my worse moments I’m a highly critical skeptic, what this comes from is a desire for truth, and freedom.
It is from this place that I ask the question: What is truly beneficial for me?
When much of our lives is the result of others’ choosing, how much of it ends up being not what we truly desire, but what we’ve been told to desire? So much of our life is handed to us preassembled, and with the words USE AS INSTRUCTED printed on the tag. Most of us don’t have to think deeply or work up a sweat to figure it out. After all, who wants to sweat? These days we can choose self-driving cars and GPS navigation, premade meals delivered to our doorsteps, instant coffee, robot vacuum cleaners, and artificial brains that will do our homework for us. Why try hard when there’s a convenient way to do just about everything?
Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.
— Tim Wu; The Tyranny of Convenience
Something that I've noticed, and others have been talking and writing about more and more recently, is that convenience is a killer. It kills our perseverance, which could be argued to be the beginning of all virtue. Those of us in the Western world who have been privileged with convenience, have chosen it to our detriment. This is evident in our culture, where people get upset if they have to go into a store to pick up their own groceries, if their online order is delayed a day, or if it takes five whole minutes for their coffee to be handed to them. I once witnessed an old man loudly, publicly and belligerently berate a young grocery store employee for missing an item on his mobile order.
Convenience, as you've no doubt seen, does ugly things to us.
I write all this to draw attention to the fact that none of our decisions is made in isolation, and a change we make in one area, affects all the other areas of life. Just as no man is an island, so too no act or habit floats out in the void of space without impacting everything else around it. Every choice that we make is a part of an infinitely complex web, never able to be untangled from those of other men and women. For obvious reasons, this is specially true of choices that we make every day, and habits that become unconscious. Certainly this applies to our use of technology — or abuse of it.
Technology can bring great things, but like any good relationship, there should be healthy boundaries. The tendency to add ‘more and more’ to tech products has placed an increasing burden on us. As we spend more time looking down at a screen we are missing the opportunity to look up, look around and engage with life.
— Punkt.
I spent my adolescence in the time before smartphones. We had a landline in our home situated out in the cornfields of rural Illinois. Half a decade after the iPhone was released I bought one for myself. Yet I can see the havoc that this ubiquitous technology has wreaked upon my own life even without having grown up with it. Today, smartphones have become a pervasive part of our lives without having asked permission. Many children now grow up with unregulated access to internet-connected digital devices before they’re even old enough to speak in complete sentences. What this will mean for the generations to come, we can only speculate.
I am not here to site statistical data on the use of digital technology and its effects on humanity at large. That isn’t something I’m qualified to speak directly to. I am writing this to draw attention to something that I have personally witnessed in my life, and that is the trend of adopting technological usage habits that are the norm without asking if they are helpful in progressing toward more healthy lives, lives filled with truth, beauty and goodness.
The stakes are mounting. Having a smart phone means more than carrying unabated and unregulated convenience in your pocket. In my opinion, the more powerful fact, beyond our data and likeness being owned by Big Tech and sold to the highest bidder, is the fact that our attention is no longer our own. When our attention is not our own, neither are our thoughts. When our interior worlds are formed and sustained by a little glass box — truly a kind of Pandora's Box — then our ability to form our own world, our own thoughts and opinions and ideas, will gradually atrophy, and we will have surrendered our own minds in favor of the Machine, which is being given more and more authority to do the thinking for us.
This is what I see as the major problem with our use (really, our abuse) of smartphones and our preference for convenience over all else. So I must ask myself: When have I gone too far? What kind of world am I building for myself, for my children, and their children?
I am making my own efforts to reclaim my mind. If I am to be the man that I wish to be — a man of peace, whose life inspires peace in those who see it — I must make decisions today that will create that man in the future. One of those decisions is to rid myself of my smartphone, in favour of something more focused. This piece itself was intended to be centred on that particular choice, though as is often the case, I find that the underlying reasons for my behaviour tend to require a deep dive into my philosophy of life to understand, and that the thing most important for me to communicate is the why of my choices. That is to say, I’m not so much interested in convincing you to get a “dumbphone.” What I am interested in is helping each of us to ask good questions of ourselves, and build the lives we really want to have. This sort of work will require great effort, and as time goes on it seems that it will also require an increasing willingness to go against the grain. And I want you to know that you are not alone in this countercultural activity.
Beauty Chasers are thinkers and listeners. They see when the world goes blind. They embody quietness when all the world wants to do is scream. They give life to others when the world seems bent on destruction. Beauty Chasers live to a different cadence.
— Timothy Willard
There are many people doing this work already. Many who hold onto anachronistic habits for the sake of the human experience, people who are strongholds of consistency in a world which is in constant flux. What I am adding to this conversation is a small part of a much greater and growing whole. And this is only a beginning. My wish is that it would at least be a beginning for you, the reader, and that it would not stop with the end of this essay. There is much more reading to do, after all, and well beyond the written word lies the lived life and organic world of human community, the challenge of change and the reward of successes born from perseverance. Beyond this screen there is tangible earth, trees to climb and beaches bordered by endless ocean, hands to hold and laughter to hear and good food to eat with friends and strangers alike. Beyond these words there is Divine Love eager to encounter you. My prayer is that you would slow down, refocus, and meet that Love.
Further reading (ongoing list)
- The Tyranny of Convenience; Tim Wu
- Smartphones, social media use and your mental health; National Library of Medicine
- Sowing Anachronism: How to be Weird in Public, and Private;
&- The Making of UnMachine Minds;
- Open Thread: The Unmachined Coffee House;
&- From Feeding Moloch to ‘Digital Minimalism’;
- What We Talk About When We Talk About “The Machine”;
- That Hideous Strength; C.S. Lewis
Great post! Hope to see the effects of adopting simple habits for life!
This was a profoundly thoughtful post Joel, and I appreciated your personal perspective and experiences. Thank you also for your generous mention!