It’s that very tenderness, that very inclination towards personalization and love that makes the Ipad and technologies like it so dangerous and disgusting. They’re no longer tools that we use to do things more easily or quickly. They’ve supplanted peaceful notions of life, whole subcategories of how we live and lived are now just time on the phone and the Ipad.
We’ve been a bit stressed out lately, Abby and I, and our phones have been taking larger and larger bites of our brains. We’ve had an approach to fending off the monster in the past that’s had limited success. “Phone Shelf.” is a place, a desire, a promise to use our phones less, and to keep them away from our bodies and faces.
We’ve successfully banished them from our bedroom for over a year. That’s an important victory, I reckon. But they have annexed the couch, and all those moments between eases. Abby and I discussed a reinvigorated campaign in promotion of the phone shelf, the place to where these ghastly devices might be banished.
It seems a common theme, upon approaching parenthood to think hard about what battles you’d like to pick. Working less? Cooking more? Being kinder? Being wiser? What thing in yourself do you believe to be most in need of improvement in light of the fact that a tiny genius is about to pick up on every facet of your personality?
It concerns me that technology concerns me as much as it does. Older generations might’ve gotten to contend with something actually interesting like being kinder, all I can worry about is that I like my skinner box far too much.