Excerpts from The Book of Life, Ch. 1

CHAPTER 1: CAPITALISM: CONSUMPTION

How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones

"We are addicted to our phones not because we rely on them, but to the extent that we recruit them to a harmful project of self-avoidance. They do not mean to hurt us. But we may – and probably do – use them to injure ourselves. Addiction sounds horrible. But it is a hard name for a normal inclination: a habit of running away from the joys and terrors of self-knowledge."

"Our minds are by nature like mad monkeys, restlessly flitting from one fleeting diversion to another, while all the things we really care about get neglected. But tragically our society and culture does not build us cloisters: it places in our hands ever-open conduits to everything that could possibly divert our minds: real estate, porn, the news, social chit-chat, strident opinion, games, special offers, puzzles, the twelve best hotels somewhere, the weirdest doings of the weirdest strangers and the intimate lives of every celebrity on the planet. We are almost powerless to resist because so many clever, hard working people are devoting their lives to making money by capturing, if only for a few seconds, the most precious thing we possess: the focus of our minds – and our time."

...We never do find them though – and for a tragic reason that our phones will not as yet own up to. Everyone out there is radically imperfect. The task of love can’t be to locate some mythical ‘right person’. Compatibility is an achievement of love, it can’t be its precondition. We’ll have learnt how to form relationships only when we surrender our attachment to perfection and learn instead to tolerate and see the point of the trickier aspects of everyone we could ever meet."

...Porn in effect says: we don’t mind about anything else in your life – just concentrate on this for a bit. Porn can be – therefore – a huge relief from the burdensome complications of intimacy. It usefully – and blissfully – removes sex from the emotional landscape of our real relationships. Which is both an immense benefit – and a terrible hidden cost."

"Almost since the beginning of time, we have prized the opportunity to get away from reminders of humanity and to immerse ourselves in nature. We have wanted to gaze on the grey indifference of the ocean or the bright, incalculable, immensity of the starry sky. We have loved to stand below towering cliffs or encounter in the flesh a tree that was planted when bison still roamed the plains. We long for the strange ennoblement – and emotional relief – that comes from recognising our own astonishing littleness in the infinite spaces of nature. These grand settings bring with them a profoundly consoling diminution of our cares: if we are so minor in the bigger scheme, so too must be our worries.

Our phones are the enemies of such experiences. They keep intruding our small selves into the picture."

...Instead of losing ourselves, we simply keep asserting our demands and appetites. We record rather than retire the needy, insatiable self. And as we post the images of the perfect sunset over the distant hills, or the clear water of the little stream in the woods, we are forgetting (as we update) what they – quietly and with great and tender majesty – might really have been trying to say to us."

"For reasons connected up with our own evolution as a species – reasons which have become tragic in the modern world – our brains crave stimulation. Once we were responding energetically to vital and serious signals from the environment about the prospect of eating a berry or of getting bitten by a snake; now, in the age of fridges and zoos we respond with equal (though deeply misplaced) urgency to anything that can prick our hyper-active fancy, however remote true sustenance or real danger may be."

"Our most urgent need is for something that for millennia was of little concern to us: calm. We react to stimuli even when we’re exhausted, worn down, over-agitated and frantic. And our phones have to accept a degree of blame – because they are the endless carriers of claims to rouse us, when what we really need is exactly the opposite: to be helped to be more serene and at peace."

"Our phone doesn’t know (and therefore cannot help us with) how much we’d rather have a true friend than a cut-price chicken or find a solution to a long running relationship row rather than get a discount on our car insurance. As we struggle up the pyramid of needs, the bargains we need to strike, the commitments we need to make, the things we most require in (or out of) our lives pass over the heads of our sleek and perfectly styled – but ultimately impoverished – phones. "

"For all their brevity, ‘liking’ and ‘friendship’ speak right to the heart of who we are. We are lonely creatures – though we might know plenty of interesting people. But others never quite know us exactly as we’d wish to be known. The most elusive – that is the darkest, most complex and most lovely – parts of who we are remain isolated."
...It isn’t our fault: a degree of distance and mutual incomprehension isn’t a sign that life has gone wrong. It’s what we should expect from the very start."
...Loneliness is simply a price we may have to pay for holding on to a sincere, ambitious view of what companionship must and could be."

"...When we play around with others, we are safely revealing less obvious, but very real, parts of who we are. Our mature, carefully composed work-selves are irrelevant as we inflate the paddling pool; it doesn’t matter how the stock-market is doing while we happily loose at chequers to an elderly neighbour (with a surprisingly inventive storehouse of swear words); or as we see the smile (familiar from childhood) appear again in the older face of our mother as she turns down her winning poker hand. And all the time, as we play for real, we’ve forgotten to check our phones."

"The problem with selfies is not that we take them, but that we don’t take them seriously enough. We tend to feel the need to be a touch ironic: ‘Here I am eating a sausage!’ ‘Look at me with this cute hat!’ Yet selfies are not inherently silly or self-regarding. They sit in one of the grand traditions of high art: the self-portrait. Although he was hampered by having to use oil paint and brushes, Rembrandt was addicted to making images of himself (more than one hundred across his long career). But he never showed himself winking or making funny hand gestures. Instead he was looking closely at who he was and what he had become: contemplating the sadness that gradually accumulated in his own face, trying to work out what he really made of being alive: what has life done to me? What have I done with my time on earth? He wasn’t seeking the approval of others, he was seeking self-knowledge. When something (like taking selfies) seems a little trivial or silly, it’s tempting to think we should take it less seriously; we should distance ourselves from it and see it in a mocking light. But the wiser move might be to get much more ambitious. The art of a selfie may have a long way to go yet."

"Technology annihilates physical but not psychological, distance. One’s words effortlessly bounce off a satellite then stall when they reach the brain of the person we most hope will receive them with full understanding."

"Our phones seem amazingly sophisticated: small miracles of compressed, practical science, working hand in hand with advanced Capitalism. We think so highly of them because we compare them to the past, rather than to the possibilities of the future. They are so much more advanced than any device we could possess twenty or forty years ago. Yet they are almost unbearably primitive, in comparison with what – ideally – the long future will bring. We are still so far from inventing the technology we really require for us to flourish; capitalism has delivered only on the simplest of our needs. We can summon up the street map of Lyons but not a diagram of what our partner is really thinking and feeling; the phone will help us follow fifteen news outlets but not help us know when we’ve spent more than enough time doing so; it emphatically refuses to distinguish between the most profound needs of our soul and a passing fancy. In the Utopia, our phones will be wiser than we are. They will be kind and not merely subservient. They will know how to edge us away from a stupid decision and how to summon up our better natures."
-- see more at http://www.thebookoflife.org/how-to-live-more-wisely-around-our-phones/