My friends had a nickname for my old phone – the roach. It was one of those tenacious little Nokia go-phones that could eat a nuclear winter for breakfast.  I’d had it since my junior year of high school, and only got it then because the girl I was dating told me to stop calling her from my home phone. So demanding. Girls aside, phones certainly do demand.
You can’t go anywhere without seeing someone glued to his or her iPhone. In fact, if you’re reading this in a public setting, I bet  if you look around right now you will see that almost everybody is doing something on cell phones. They might be doing something we would consider to be useful, like checking emails or sending someone a text.  Or they might be checking Facebook or Twitter, reading up on all those vital feeds.  These capabilities are the result of technological advancements for sure, but I think too often we forget not all progress is good progress. At the very least, we don’t think critically enough about it.
So why do we spend so much time on our phones and on the Internet? I think it’s because we’re scared of boredom.  In fact, I think we’re terrified of it and have tried to kill it. The Internet and the computer dealt boredom a major blow, but due to portability issues, it survived. The advent of the smartphone, however, finished the job. Whenever there’s a moment of silence in our day, what do we do? We instinctively grab for our phones.  Then we check Facebook or Twitter, or we text somebody – anybody, it doesn’t matter who at that point. We simply will not settle for boredom. Gone are the days where we sit down, with nothing to do, and merely think about things.  (Seriously, next time you get on a bus, I dare you to turn your phone off and see if you can make it without reaching for it.)
Our minds are constantly pulled here and there, as we try to digest a hundred different thoughts fed to us by our smartphones.  It’s no wonder our best and brightest ideas come when we’re in the shower or when we’re driving.  Only then can we give our minds a rest, and, funny as it is, the result always seems positive. In a way, I think our obsession with our new technologies describes a part of our human predicament, in that we are always searching for that which will satisfy us.  But nothing ever does.
We always want the next phone, the next gadget and the next big thing. We are never content; we always grasp for more. Of course this is an age-old problem, but it is especially highlighted today by things like new iPhone releases.  Because unfortunately, as sweet as SIRI is, no Apple product will ever bring us fulfillment.  At some point we need to realize by investing so much of ourselves into the latest and greatest, we are only blanketing ourselves in a sort of technological comforter. If we fail to realize this, we’ll just have to wait around to be fooled yet again. Neil Postman, almost 30 years ago, wrote: “There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.” Our new iPhones might be neat, but I think we miss our old little phones more than we know.