Feeling It

I had met this guy literally eight or ten minutes before, and he was now screaming at me from 30 feet up the trail. Everything was covered in wind-blown snow, and we were just sort of pointing ourselves uphill, keeping our heads down, and trudging on. The wind was gusting to probably 40 miles per hour, blasting us with frigid air and pellets of snow as we struggled toward the Continental Divide. He was yelling, “It lets you know you’re alive, doesn’t it?!?!” with a sort of smile on his face, shoulders hunched against the wind. I couldn’t argue with him. I was cold, tired of walking uphill, not really enjoying the abrasive blasts of snow every few seconds, and definitely not convinced that I needed to go to the summit. A few years later, I got my first smartphone, allowing me to do many cool new things, but most notably, it enabled me to obliterate chunks of time staring at it, using my thumb to tap and scroll to see what other people were doing, or saying, or what they were saying about what other people were doing or saying. It was glorious. In 2018, the company that made the smartphone introduced a feature that would show me how much time I spent staring at my smartphone each day, which was, of course, appalling. I told myself I needed to keep up on Social Media Things and Regular Media Things and Important News Of The World for my work, and that my phone was crucial for me to do those things, and to communicate. This made me feel OK, but I kind of knew it wasn’t 100% true. The movie is 30-plus years old, and lots of technology has come into our lives since then. I am sure I’m not alone in feeling like Mitch at the end of a week of Zoom meetings, e-mail/Slack, and staring into glowing screens while I create digital somethings. When I shut down everything at the end of the day, my desk often looks exactly the same as it would if I had never clocked in that morning: Then I took my dog to the hardware store to buy some nails or paint or something, and interacted with three-dimensional people for just a few minutes: It was sort of like I found a life preserver to yank me out of the water I had been swimming in all day: I don’t have an app that tells me how much total time I spent each day talking to my wife, and running on a trail, and feeling the wind on my face, and petting dogs, and in the flow state of measuring and slicing and sauteing and stirring in the hope it will taste good. But I wish I did, because I think I’ve been gradually losing my appreciation for how important those things are, for a while now.