Here\u2019s a memory from before the first iPhone was released.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Due to a train strike I find myself stuck in the city of Luxembourg while on my way to France. What should I do? I have no friends, no connections, no map of the place, and only a sketchy understanding of the French language. I meet a Canadian at a youth hostel who, like me, is 19 years old. We chat for a bit and then decide to set off for a\u00a0discotheque.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We have no internet, no way to find \u201cthe best\u201d discotheque, no way to read online reviews and evaluate where we will have the ultimate \u201cexperience.\u201d We\u2019re a little confused, but then all at once I catch sight of a sign that looks like it can show us the way. It\u2019s for a disco called \u201cOne of a Kind\u201d (or at least that\u2019s how my high school French interprets what it says). So we start following the sign.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And then we catch sight of another, identical sign. And another. These signs lead us deeper and deeper into the city. In tandem with our wandering, deeper and deeper goes our conversation. We go down alleyways and backroads. We ask strangers for directions and strike up conversations everywhere. We talk about our estrangements from our parents, our obsessions, our dreams for the future.\u00a0We don\u2019t become fast friends for life. But what we\u2019ve accidentally found is meaningful. It makes us feel a little less lonely. A little less aimless. It gives us some heart to carry on.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
About an hour into our search, we find two signs each, separately advertising the discotheque \u201cOne of a Kind\u201d but pointing directly at one another across an intersection. It\u2019s then that we realize that this is no advertisement for a discotheque. It\u2019s a common street sign. Sens Unique means \u201cOne Way.\u201d We laugh, find a restaurant, and have a dinner that we both enjoy. We never end up going to the disco, but who cares?<\/p>\n
I think of this anecdote as we welcome yet another iPhone into the world (the seventeenth!) because there\u2019s pretty much no chance it would ever happen today. My Canadian and I would have looked up \u201cdisco in Luxembourg.\u201d We would have evaluated the merits of this disco or that one relative to our location in the city. Perhaps we would have disagreed on which disco we found preferable and parted ways in favor of our respective choices. Whatever the case, the silly dinner afterwards would never have taken place, and my Canadian friend would have remained a stranger.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some might say the smartphone-assisted version of this evening would have been preferable. Such people might argue that we\u2019ve evolved and been led forward by a miracle in our pockets. We never need to get lost again!\u00a0<\/p>\n
But I think there\u2019s a much darker interpretation of this miracle. Inadvertently, the smartphone has destroyed our impetus to wander, get lost, and find ourselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wandering and getting lost is an intrinsic part of our humanity. It\u2019s baked into our very bones. For 290,000 of the 300,000 years we\u2019ve been on this planet, we mostly wandered. Our prehistorical ancestors covered dozens of miles a day, sometimes in search of game. Sometimes looking for a warm place to sleep. But sometimes just simply to move across territory and observe.\u00a0To\u00a0be\u00a0in motion, head up, eyes and ears attuned to serendipity, was our natural state of being.<\/p>\n
But capitalism cannot tolerate \u201cfree\u201d time and space.\u00a0And, so, at last, we have the iPhone.\u00a0A device that forces us to\u00a0look down and ignore changes in light.\u00a0We have\u00a0its sister device, the air pod, a blindfold for the ears which encourages us to disregard the whispers of the planet.\u00a0And perhaps most nefariously, we have Apple and Google Maps, which conspire to take our time and space at the same time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No longer does one simply roll the dice and go.\u00a0Instead one chooses a destination and walks toward it. Along the way the route is commodified. Restaurants suggested instead of found. Parks digitally delineated instead of outlined by the contours of our promenades.<\/p>\n
This enclosure of our physical wandering is now mirrored in capitalist technology\u2019s latest enclosure of our thinking routes. For if there is a mental equivalent to the factory of the body, surely it is the \u201csearch\u201d function increasingly baked into the inquiries of the mind as planned out by ChatGPT.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No longer do you wander from book to book, author to author, mind to mind, serendipitously finding so many other things than what you are looking for. Now you plug in your question and you get \u201cTHE answer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Is this not short-circuiting our inherent curiosity? Living with the mystery of an unanswered question might be the greatest gift life can give to us. Is not losing yourself in a stream of deep thoughts in search of that elusive answer not part of the process of gaining wisdom?\u00a0<\/p>\n
For anyone who has ever meditated for any length of time, this is self-evident. When you meditate, you don\u2019t plug \u201cpeace\u201d into your mind and then get a search result which leads you to peace. Rather, in meditation, the struggling of the mind, the seemingly pointless questing for distraction, and then, the hard road back to centeredness is the point of it all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The road of searching is the fertilizer in which peace grows. Bypassing it just doesn\u2019t work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And herein I think our opposable thumbs have tapped us to a dead end. Instead of letting our legs carry us aimlessly down the road with our minds interrogating every step, our thumbs pose too simple a question to which our smartphones are pleased to give us too simple an answer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The British author Douglas Adams quite rightly parodied this line of inquiry decades ago in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when the super computer Deep Thought is asked the answer to the question of \u201cthe meaning of life, the universe and everything.\u201d The computer calculates for 7.5 million years and concludes that the answer is . . . \u201cforty two.\u201d Earth itself, it turns out in Adams\u2019 telling, is the only calculator that can give us the meaning we seek.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI have two doctors, my left leg and my right,\u201d said the historian G.M. Trevelyan.\u00a0If we are to have a future that benefits from the lessons of our past, I\u2019d suggest that we take Trevelyan\u2019s statement as a prescription.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We need to walk. But more importantly, we need to wander.\u00a0To wander in physical space as well as in our minds. To wander without intent, without surveillance, without the anticipation of acquisition and without expectation that the walk might benefit anything other than our freedom of spirit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s a memory from before the first iPhone was released.\u00a0 Due to a train strike I find myself…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172771,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[165,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-172770","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}