I picked up a copy of the Chicago Tribune at OHare Airport before a flight back to Denver. A column by Phil Rosenthal caught my eye, Living to tell about life with no cell phone. The subheadline read, Absent companion haunts unplugged family vacation.
It seems that Mr. Rosenthal took the radical step of purposely leaving his smart phone at home for a one week vacation.
He suffered.
He couldn’t find out the weather ahead of time. He couldn’t figure out which restaurant to eat at based on online reviews. He couldn’t help other people out of small jams, or, to be more accurate, he imagined that people would have asked him for help based on information available via his smart phone.
He couldn’t consult any maps, use his phone as an alarm, or make notes to himself.
He had to lug around his own camera. Can you imagine?
Life without his smart phone — it was tough.
He had an outlet for cheating. Every couple of days he visited a business center at a hotel and purged himself of 400 or so daily emails junk that clogged his work files.
Something funny happened to Mr. Rosenthal. He discovered that the benefits of a non-phone vacation outweighed the void.
He engaged with his kids.
He paid attention at dinner (no furtive glances at his phone).
He focused on the landscape.
Other than the occasional visit to the business center, he was freed of the burden of emails, tweets and Facebook posts about the latest comments on the latest comments by Donald Trump. ”Turns out I didn’t miss that at all, which was an eye-opener,” Mr. Rosenthal writes. At the business centers he didn’t respond to more than a dozen or so emails in eight days, which was liberating.
Someone recently gaped and gasped at me as I opened my phone — a flip phone. ”You still have a flip phone?” he asked incredulously.
I do. By not owning a smart phone I’m sure theres a lot I miss. Here is what I don’t miss:
Electronic communications, every single day, after I leave the office (not to mention, every Shabbos, but thats another story).
A certain benefit larger than all the benefits that Mr. Rosenthal temporarily enjoyed on his vacation the opportunity to think.
In the last number of years, in the minutes here and the hours there that I could have spent tethered to a smart phone, I’ve managed to think through a book and am now writng the last chapter. Maybe it will change the world, maybe it won’t. For sure, the knowledge base it has given me has enriched me infinitely more than the scattered pieces of information a smart phone might have supplied.
And something else: Total information about every fathomable detail of life going forward kills the sense of wonder in our lives and dulls the deeper trust in G-d that He will imbue the unexpected with meaning.
The smart phone conveys a double illusion: first, I no longer need to think, as the phone seduces me into letting other peoples thoughts fill my mind for large blocs of time that should be my own; second, I no longer need to live with uncertainty an almost wholly forgotten value. I flip out, you might say.
When Mr. Rosenthal got home from his vacation, he did something unusual: he shared his pictures with his phone — his servant, not his boss.
Not that it was easy to right the relationship. “Even without the phantom vibrations I sometimes felt for incoming texts I wasn’t receiving,” he writes, “I was acutely aware of the void in my pocket and an appreciation of just how integral the phone has become.”
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
