Cell Phones Were Always A Bad Idea

The truth was there all along, we just didn’t pay attention

It was the Spring of 2008.  I had recently wrapped up my college football career (I use the word “career” lightly.  I was basically a practice tackling dummy who got rewarded with sideline seats on Saturdays) and was no longer being drug tested.  With this newfound freedom, I decided to make up for lost time by trying to smoke four years worth of pot in one semester.  I don’t say this to try and sound cool, as I am a very annoying kind of high person.  I’m either over-the-top paranoid or claiming that banal statements are filled with profound insight.  But one night at a party, I landed on something I think was genuinely perceptive.  Even a stoned clock is right twice a day.

I had recently discovered Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused and was singing its praises to some friends of mine.  I was monologuing with a high level of intensity, telling the people around me something along the lines of, “What’s so cool about this movie is that no one has cell phones, ‘cause it was the 70s right?  So wherever they are in the movie, they have no choice but to be there.  They’re not constantly texting somebody, trying to find something better.  They go to a place, and they have to just be, man.  They have to just be with the people that they’re with!  And that’s our problem right now.  We can never enjoy where we are.  Because of our phones, we’re always looking for a better place to go than the one we’re currently at.  Isn’t that messed up?”

Looking back on it, this was an incredibly quaint complaint to have in 2008.  When I was a senior in college, the first iPhone hadn’t even been out for a year and wasn’t widely available.  Everyone I knew had a clam shell or brick style cell phone that used T9 texting.  And yet I still felt that these types of cell phones were preventing us from inhabiting the present moment.  Cute, right?  It was like that scene in 1981’s My Dinner With Andre where Andre bemoans the fact that everyone seems to be drifting through life on autopilot, not engaging with the world around them.  You want to grab him by his cardigan and scream “Buddy, you have no idea how bad it is going to get.”

Even though the phones we had at the time were nothing compared to the ones we’d get in a few years, I was definitely on to something with this thought.  It didn’t matter that my entire peer group could only use Facebook on our laptops, or that we had no idea what Twitter was, or that Instagram didn’t even exist yet.  The fundamental social function of cell phones was the same in 2008 as it is today.  They allow us to imagine a better reality than the one we’re currently in, and then go searching for it in vain.  You get the same basic experience whether you’re scrolling TikTok or texting somebody “where r u?” on a dial pad.

I had this insight, and then I totally lost sight of it as I moved into my adult life.  Well, maybe not totally.  I always had a healthy aversion to social media, but not enough to disengage from it completely.  I knew I needed to use it for comedy, and I allowed its negative effects to wash over me as it became a bigger and bigger part of the comedy world.  I hated my phone and all of the mental baggage that came with it, but I viewed it as the price I had to pay to follow my dreams.

Even though I felt this way, I don’t think there’s anything I would have done differently over the last decade.  What was the alternative, delete my online presence and have an even less successful career than the one I ended up with?  Luckily, once I quit pursuing comedy, I was also able to quit using social media.  Performing on my last show is a sad memory, but deleting Facebook was one of the happiest days of my adult life.

There’s been a surge of discourse recently about the negative side effects cell phones and social media have on people, especially young kids.  This is overwhelmingly positive.  It feels like we’re finally talking, out loud, about this thing we’ve always understood intuitively but never really wanted to admit, for whatever reason.  Because wasn’t it always so obvious? Even I, a way-too-high 21 year old, was able to wrap my head around it, and that was before this technology took over our lives. But forget about my experience. Do you know a single person that has a positive relationship with their cell phone, or even a neutral one? Or is it something they’re always attempting to use less often?

I don’t need to see all the charts and graphs in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation to understand the harmful effects of holding a portal to a mimetic fantasy world in my hands all day.  I just need to pay attention to how I feel whenever I pick up my phone out of reflex, for no particular reason.  I feel empty and sad and dulled on the inside.  I still do it to this day, even without any social media accounts to check.  The insidious design of this technology continues to hold sway over me.  But that’s the point.  These things are built to hijack your consciousness, no matter what app you're using.  Picking up your phone to mindlessly check Instagram is one thing.  When you’re picking up your phone to thoughtlessly peruse IDMb, then you know something is wrong, all the way down to the roots.

My cousin told me that she recently showed her teenage daughter 10 Things I Hate About You for the first time.  The opening scene, where David Krumholtz is showing Joseph Gordon-Levitt around the school before class starts, weaving through a jam-packed quad while all the different social groups hang out, talk, and play roller hockey, was entirely unfamiliar to her.  It resembled nothing about her life as a modern day high schooler.  She might as well have been watching the time portal scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  

When I watched Dazed and Confused for the first time, a movie that takes place 28 years before my senior year of high school, at least it somewhat resembled my teenage experience.  Sure, we had the ability to text and we didn’t violently haze freshmen, but the foundation of driving around, hanging out and talking was all there.  But things have gone so far off the rails that 10 Things I Hate About You, a movie that depicts high school 25 years ago, takes place in a completely different world than the one we’re in today.  If they shot that movie now, the kids would be huddled in circles on their phones, or shuffling into early morning study hall environments mandated by overprotective parents and school bureaucrats.  They wouldn’t have the desire or the freedom to hang out, talk, read body language or make eye contact.  Their experience would be totally flattened.  And there’s a direct line from that reality all the way back to the introduction of cell phones, even “dumb” ones from the Y2K era.

We should have known better.  We should have paid attention to what our phones were doing to us and been wary of them.  But we were enthralled by this new and exciting technology. The idea that all technological progress is good progress was still very present in the collective psyche of our society.  Things do seem to be shifting though, on a small scale, and I hope it’s not just a passing fad.  I agree with Haidt’s suggestion of removing phones from schools and not giving them to teenagers.  Hopefully, in the future, this will create more well-rounded adults who are inherently skeptical of this technology, who can go to a party, hang out, and just be with the people that they’re with, man.