It’s important to put your phone away sometimes

The setting was almost absurdly idyllic. We sat under a white tent, the sun, having just slipped beneath the horizon, casting shades of pink and purple, a verdant vineyard ahead, and in front of us, an impeccable meal matched with excellent wine.

So, naturally, the thing I felt most compelled to do was pull out my phone, take a picture and post it to Instagram.

That about sums up the weekend my fiancé and I spent in Niagaraon-the-lake. Amid the brilliant food and drinks, I found myself again and again nagged by a desire to constantly take out my phone — yes, in part to capture our sojourn, but also just to stay connected to a vague something.

The urge to document one’s life is, I suppose, a part of emerging gingerly into what we might optimistically call POST-COVID life. To put up a picture of a trip on Instagram is, one way, the usual awkward mix of genuine sharing and a cry for attention; but in another sense, it is also a way to put up a flare and say “Look at me, out in the world again after so long!”

I am glad I have photos of my trip. There are a couple of my partner in particular — one softened by my phone’s portrait mode, another of her cast against a kaleidoscopic sunset — that will join others in my mind as part of how I think of her.

Yet, as we all start to move out in to the world again, I can’t help but wonder if it might not be time to reconsider our relationship to technology — that is, when we holiday or are simply out in a POST-COVID (or at least endemic COVID) world, that it might not actually feel better if we put our phones away.

That sort of assertion is old hat by now, and complaints about technology are as part and parcel of the digital era as the technology itself.

Those ubiquitous exhortations to “get off that darn phone” can often be well-intentioned, rooted in a desire to have people connect with the physical world around them, but are also occasionally naive, even ignorant or harmful.

Consider: What it means for a trans teen in small-town Canada to be on their phone all day is likely very different from when I’m idly scrolling through Twitter or Tiktok. Whereas I am just wasting time, for the teen that time online may well be a lifeline, and the idea that screens take you away from life is its own form of anachronistic thinking.

A major part of life, after all, happens on and in screens; you can’t say that heaving, nearly infinite mass of human activity that accounts for the thoughts and feelings of billions of people merely amounts to nothing.

The pandemic era, however, perhaps casts that all in a slightly different light. We have spent over two years glued to our screens, our phones and computers becoming nearly inescapable. Yes, tech is a tether and conduit to the broader world around us, but in its blinking,

When we holiday or are simply out in a POST-COVID (or at least endemic COVID) world, would it maybe feel better if we put our phones away, Navneet Alang wonders

beeping insistence, it is an anchor, too, a weight that pulls us into an undifferentiated mass of news, opinion, fluff and distraction.

Perhaps that more than anything is why it is better to to sometimes leave one’s phone in one’s pocket.

It is not that there is anything wrong with checking the news or taking a photo to have a memory of a shared time. Rather, it is that our phones are extensions of our desire to control — to see and be seen as we wish.

When we put them down, we simply offer the world a chance to impinge upon us rather than the other way around. Those things — sunsets and arrangements of clouds; the sounds of birds and insects flitting about; the words or idiosyncratic habits of others; the simple, pregnant possibility of silence and stillness — are opened to us slightly more when we simply sit and watch.

I think it is a mistake to posit the world outside the screen as pure and technology as corrupted; you never know when someone finds themselves wasting time and when they are connecting with something they find meaningful.

Still, the world of the pandemic and what comes after it may be a useful time to reconsider how we relate to our phones.

There is value, too, in the memory that goes unrecorded — that can only be brought to mind in a conversation between you and another. And in letting experience just breathe, we make space for those things that are shared and not captured.

There is no untouched, unmediated experience — but perhaps putting down our phones sometimes lets us come a bit closer to one.