Sitting in Cars with Phones

Going everywhere and nowhere at the same time

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon in recent days.

Every Monday, after I drop my kids off at co-op, I drive through a large shopping center on my way to the grocery store. And every Monday, without fail, I see at least a dozen cars parked at various intervals throughout the lot idling while their drivers sit, heads down, scrolling on their phones. Many times, after an hour in the store, I come back out to see them in the same spots, still scrolling.

I get in my car, drive away, and wonder, “What the hell have we done to ourselves?”

The mindless scroll.

The quick check-in while we wait for everyone to buckle.

The bored swipe in the school pick-up line.

We’re all so accustomed to having the world at our fingertips that we’ve trained our bodies to act on autopilot, reaching for our phones before we’ve even made the conscious decision to do so. And while we’re living in the Cloud—buying, selling, texting, working, all from the same seated position—the physical world continues to move around us. Increasingly, we are absent from it.

Sometimes I imagine us as hospital patients who wake up after ten years in a coma to discover nothing about the world we knew exists anymore. We’ve aged, but grown no wiser. We’ve changed, but to no benefit. We’ve gone everywhere, in every time, but to absolutely nowhere.

People like to joke about Millennials being the most nostalgic generation, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. We are the last ones to have a largely tech-free childhood. There wasn’t a desktop computer in my house until I was seven and internet wasn’t widely available until I was about twelve. Even then, it was dial-up. None of us above the age of 35 will ever forget the slow, staticky sound of our computers connecting to the world wide web, or the frustration we felt when someone picked up the landline and knocked us off AIM just as the boy we liked logged on. We watched our shows and played our video games and texted our friends, of course—but, as the saying goes, the internet was a place we visited, not a place we lived.

Last week, when I lost my iPhone for three days, it is no exaggeration to say I felt physically lighter without it. I realized that just having the option to pick up a device limits my ability to engage with the tangible on a daily basis, even if I don’t actually use it. I had to use my Mac in order to text anyone, which meant I had to be at home. I had to Google directions to my early voting location and then write them down. I was forced to use the optometrist’s landline to call my husband about our insurance because I didn’t have access to the app. The inconvenience was slight, at best. I still had access to all sorts of wonderful technology. I just didn’t have it attached to my body 24/7.

Gen Z is copycatting a lot of our early ‘00s trends and—even though a trip through Target currently makes me feel fifteen again—I don’t think it’s just about the fashion. Take a look at the comments on this video. The sense of loss for the childhoods they never had is palpable. There is deep longing for a time when people paid attention to one another, when we didn’t have a thousand ways to obsess about what our friends were doing or where the guy we like is hanging out because the options simply didn’t exist. We were never meant to have this much access to one another. It makes for such a lonely, depleted existence.

In the wake of the election, I’ve noticed a stark difference in the responses of those who are active on social media and those who are not. The former are struggling to gain a sense of equilibrium as they witness and participate in highly-reactive content. While their feelings about the result are valid (because feelings are not “good” or “bad”; they just are) their ability to self-regulate is severely diminished because of how the emotional centers of their brains are increasingly overwhelmed. The latter, voters who might be disappointed or even frightened at the idea of another Trump presidency but who have reduced their online engagement, are approaching this new administration with shoulders back and chins high, neither apathetic nor unconcerned, but quietly hopeful.

Do they live in different realities? We all experience the world from our own unique perspective, which affects how we view reality. But I would argue that our addiction to our phones is fundamentally altering the way we perceive our neighbors, the world, and our place within it. When the time we spend is measured in clicks, likes, shares, and comments—without a measure of touch, presence, tone—we are more likely to live with an elevated nervous system, out of touch with everyday beauty.

These are lessons I’ve had to learn over a decade of trying to make my phone work in my favor. I kept trying to live with boundaries on my social media use and lists of why and when I would create content, but there is no workable limit that can be placed on a device designed to make us feel limitless. Our reliance is a feature, not a bug. We will always succumb to its siren call until the day we put it away for good. We will continue to go everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. We will sit in our cars and scroll until we finally look up and ask, “What am I doing here?”

“Living,” I hope we’ll say then. “Abundantly.”