I spent a few minutes skimming through the Sydney Sunday Herald yesterday, whilst trying out a (promising sounding) ‘long mac’.
I’m too much of a child to enjoy black coffee; find most white options overly milky and tepid; and I’m far too stingy to fork out for the minuscule piccolo or traditional macchiato. And so, to the shock of absolutely no one, I tend to just order a flat white.
But here was a long macchiato - the answer to ALL my problems. A shot of rich espresso topped off with delicious milk foam. Only bigger, only better.
Turns out this place’s wondrous creation was just a regular macchiato, but called a ‘long mac’ because it was the same price as a long black, it rhymed, and the owner thought it looked cool on the menu. Crushing disappointment. The teeny-tiny coffee wad delicious, I admit, and had the same effect as to what I imagine injecting rocket fuel directly into my eyeballs would have.
Probably explains this incoherent ramble.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Buried in the letters section of the Herald was a wonderful note from a Denis Martin: “All I have is a laptop and a mobile phone. I have realised, in my 80s, that the phrase ‘left to his own devices’ now has another meaning”.
This comment is strikingly accurate when it comes to life today. And not just for how Mr Martin literally meant - the streamlining of all our things alongside technology. No, what my caffeine-fuelled brain read into was the changing of human behaviour, brought on by the marvel that is the smartphone.
We are now consumed by our devices, rather than just using them to consume.
Continuing the broader trend toward omni-labelisation, a feature that has infiltrated the world of work (think ‘quiet quitting’ - a generation-old phenomenon with a shiny new name) and showbiz (looking at you ‘Nepo Babies’); today, it is our reliance on smartphones that is having its own moment in the sun.
That’s because we have the heinously named ‘phubbing’. Or to the other layman, the snubbing of someone in favour of your smartphone. A habit that is on the rise, much to the detriment of relationships.
Sherry Turkle observed over a decade ago that smartphones encourage people to live “alone together”. Fast forward to today and we have, as the School of Life put it, “the constant challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone”. And who can compete with every friend, all the content, and all the information in the world, all at once?
Ian Bogost came (somewhat) to the defence of smartphones in his column for The Atlantic last month, landing on the amusing yet “spine-chilling revelation: we couldn’t remember what we did [before them], because there was nothing to remember having done”. It was all daytime TV and trashy magazines, a whole lot of nothingness while waiting for the next thing to happen.
So, we can’t really blame someone for being on their phone, can we?
But why ‘phubbing’ and being left to your own devices is so pertinent, is that it’s not just about the rudeness (the appearance that you’re not interested in the other person), it’s that you yourself become less interesting. Before smartphones, we were allowed to be bored. Today we are boring.
There’s no mystery to the person scrolling. No willingness to listen. We are all deadly dull once we unlock that home screen.
It reminded me of a video on street photography I watched a while back (I can’t remember the exact one and that is why I need to write stuff down). In it though, one line stood out - it’s that you’ll never see a good photo of someone on their phone. Or at the very least, a truly great snap. Because people on their phones aren’t interesting. They’re self-obsessed mushes of nothing (unless you’re reading this post on your smartphone, in which case, you legend).
I think you should be rewarded for walking into one of the iZombies - those that walk with headphones in, staring down at their phones. They’d be more interesting as they rage and chase you down the street at the very least.
Left to your own devices not only irritates those around you, it also reduces you to a shell of your full-self. Staring into the void rather than appreciating who and what is around you. We’re losing the magical human trait of being able to notice things in the moment and react with true spontaneity.
Maybe I’m overthinking again. Maybe it’s just a storm in a tea (coffee) cup. Whatever it is, I blame the ‘long mac’. It wasn’t a long enough distraction.