I Keep Coming Back to My Phone

Sometimes this is just a public diary where I work through being a person who cares in a world that doesn't.

Photo by Rami Al-zayat on Unsplash

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There is an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza that needs our attention and assistance. Please call your Representative and your Senators and demand that they call for a ceasefire, and that we do not send any unconditional aid to the government of Israel which has killed thousands of children and tens of thousands of civilians, and displaced and starved millions. If you need some guidance, leave a comment, or check out this guide. You can also contact the White House here.

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I keep coming back to my phone. 

I want to be an engaged, informed, and active person. I want to know what’s going on in the world. I want to learn from others, hear more about their experiences, let my thoughts and opinions change as I take in new information. I want to share my own thoughts, talk them through with people, and have conversations. 

I don’t know if social media was ever as good for these things as we thought it was, but I think it is undeniable that it has gotten demonstrably worse for these things in the past year or two. And yet I keep coming back to my phone. 

It’s been particularly bad this week. Some of the worst habits I thought I’d mostly broken resurfaced, and I found myself back on the algorithmic side of twitter, the one literally designed to keep you on the site as long as possible, and more than that I found myself in the worst of the doom scroll, where you keep scrolling until you reach a tweet you’ve read before and then head back to the top of your feed where, inevitably on the “for you” tab, there are 35 more tweets to read no matter how much time has past. Without trying, the hours slip away, the real world fades from your periphery, and then it’s just up and down and up and down - sometimes funny, sometimes sharp, but mostly anger and vitriol and bad news. 

After a while, I realize what I’m doing and I pull myself out, and the next thing I know it’s Instagram or Tumblr or Two Dots. For a while, I hide my phone. I’ve gotten into knitting recently so I knit myself a little phone pouch because I heard somewhere that if you can’t see your phone you’re less likely to mindlessly pick it up. And it works for a while, before someone texts, or I need my calculator, or the dual factor authentication for work. And then the cycle repeats. Chasing the bad things, hiding from the bad things. I keep coming back to my phone. 

It’s not like there’s not enough bad things out there to chase and hide from. Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and Russia’s campaign in Ukraine have killed tens of thousands, and starved, displaced, or injured millions more. Our appetite to use our aid and influence to end either crisis either dwindles or was never really there to begin with. There is a vocal segment of the intelligentsia gunning for a wider war, and an immense and powerful inertia in American foreign policy that seems to be leading us there. And there is a growing and pervasive cynicism in our politics that has led so many to internalize the belief that there is no solution but catastrophe.

The question I keep coming back to with my phone, whether I’m heading towards social media or a game or even the Stitch Fix app and its Tinder style daily style quizzes, is what am I really looking for. I’ve written about this before, last summer as Republicans were flinging us towards a global financial crisis with a veritable frenzy. But just like the habits surge and fade like the tides, so does the question. 

I’m looking for a tweet that’s going to make me feel better. Someone who has a sunnier outlook on the situation, someone who thinks things are not as bad as they seem. Or someone who thinks things are as bad as they seem but agrees with me on how to handle it. 

I’m looking for the right answer, the correct position, the moral stance. If you’ve spent even a few minutes on social media, you know there is one. Everyone is one thousand percent certain of it.

I’m looking for a reminder to feel bad. There is so much awful shit happening in the world, so much violence and bigotry and pain and fear, that it should be impossible to turn away from, and yet when you do turn away, for a moment, because we all must, the guilt floods in. 

I always said I was going to be the last one out of twitter, turning out the lights on an abandoned virtual building as we all head for bigger and brighter things, but lately I’m not so sure. So much of social media is an illusion, a relentless drum beat of now, now, now. There is nothing but this moment, no space for nuance, no space for context. The best parts of social media, the contact with far away friends, the insights into lives and people and thoughts you might otherwise never have had access to right alongside and made equal to a wide range of incapacitating poison. On Instagram the stories flit by - pictures of friends, a horrible video, three ads, a beautiful apartment, a baby picture, a three paragraph rant typed out on the wrong platform, three more ads. And so it goes. 

There’s always a broader conversation to be had about our phone usage, about how easy it is to disappear inside something that is specifically engineered to keep you there, about how more and more often we seem to be forgoing real social connection for the facsimile of it we get on our various feeds. But the thing that’s been really killing me this week is the paralysis. I get off twitter and my mind runs around in circles. I try to triangulate some sort of position out of the morass of the internet and it’s just a house of cards. It’s meta commentary all the way down.  I can’t find my own anger, my own grief, my own organizing principle. I don’t know what to do. 

So this is part rant and part reminder, to myself and to you if you need it, that we are not honor bound to scroll relentlessly through the most self-righteous, vitriolic, rigid, or vicious takes the internet has to offer. The answers I’m looking for aren’t there. My goal, always, is to be informed, to not shy away from complexity or nuance, nor to waffle in the face of the truth. And my goal is to act. To fight for I believe in, where we can all thrive, and where we see, affirm, and honor the humanity in all of us in the best way I know how. And it is impossible to do either of those things without feeling bad sometimes, because there is a lot of pain and suffering in the world. But it is also impossible to do either of those things by constructing your feelings and philosophy out of the relentless immediacy of everyone else’s first thoughts. I need my own philosophy, to find my own process, my own center to come back to again and again. The fight does not benefit from my paralysis, or yours. 

This week, let’s look somewhere else.