In recent days, I stumbled into Viva La Dirt League's Are Cellphones Ruining Us? podcast episode. It's just three dudes, admittedly three guys who pour a lot of joy into people's lives, talking about their own behavior and experience with cell phones.

I was taken aback by how miserable they are while being unable to escape their phones. I don't know if that's the difference between ages 35-40 versus 45, but as the tech evolved, I quickly did my own thing. Phones have no dominion over me.

I recall writing a post in 2005 (among the lost archives) specifically about how I disliked how folks would have that squirrel reflex to anything their phone does during a face-to-face conversation. Contextually, it was at Republic Coffee on Madison with "dumb" phones, but I already saw a glimpse of today coming on the horizon as an existential threat.

I considered what does it mean if anyone can instantly break into my life and hop up-and-down like an impetuous child, that we would have no quiet places to recharge...that we're always flipped to on...that what we're doing individually or who we're am investing time into is not important.

There was once a time when checking a notification on a phone was awkward if not outright rude—conveying to to the person who is sharing their day with you that WHATEVER this notification is about, it's more important than them. Maybe in the present, people's online follower tendencies inform them that they don't really matter, so they accept endure this behavior by others. I suspect they might even champion it, "We must bow down before the wonderful and mighty...Steve."

There is no age I would have fallen for TikTok or Instagram nonsense. How could it? I wouldn't know the first thing about how to communicate on those platforms. "I gotta take a picture every day? Edit a video?!" It all comes off as an evil marketer's dream: a magazine ad platform on one side and a TV ad space on the other all swirled together with that photoshopped me-me-me. And the followers of the Great Steve will spend hours at a time bathing in all of that uselessness and narcissism!

You can count me out on that.

I shake my head. Nevertheless, I heed VLDL's warning. As I stated the other day, I got around to cutting ties with Google and Garmin. I factory-resetted my phone and crossed the Android Debug Bridge. My phone can't used as a time vortex. While I'm on the fence about having a web browser on it, I retain Bitwarden. System utilities aside, I've got a Bible, GTY, and Spotify. That's it. I can be called and even texted. But, there's no email client. My life isn't my phone. This former Bolton High School's Who's Who of Computer Science is alive!

This early VLDL video from 2014 on pedestrian crossings sums up my take on all of this:

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