Just fifteen years ago today

 

Just a few days ago, driving from one point to another across town, I was grateful that my phone could direct me on the shortest path and keep me from getting totally lost.  Earlier, I had checked the weather, put a hold on a book at the library, and looked up a verse.  I texted my husband that I was on the way home.

What did we do before we had cell phones?

I was shocked when I read –on my phone this morning—that just 15 years ago today, the first iPhone was sold in stores. 

How rapidly our lives and our culture have changed.   And in that short course of time, Americans now spend an average of 5.4 hours per day on phones. 

In his book You Are What You Love, professor and philosopher James K. A. Smith examines our seemingly innocent routines.  “Many of us have adopted habits without much reflection…And what if those rituals aren’t just something you do?  What if they are also doing something to you?”

This morning, as every morning, more than 70 percent of people checked their phones in their very first moments of waking up and starting their day.  When she read that statistic, author and Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren was shocked. And moments later, she realized she was one of them.  From the moment she woke up, she realized the stress of the world was infiltrating her thoughts and woven into her day. Good morning, the world is a mess.  She made an intentional choice and changed that routine. In examining her own personal habits, she realized that she didn’t have to live that way.  She chose something different, and began by starting her first moments by praying and reading a passage of the Bible.  And almost immediately, she noticed, “…very subtly, my day was imprinted differently,” she observed.

“We have forgotten that there are better ways to live,” she says in her book Liturgies of the Ordinary. 

How have our phones changed us in the past fifteen years?  They have moved from being a luxury, to an essential, to a preoccupation, to a type of addiction.  Let’s call it as it is.  Objects in the mirror may be closer than we think.

In You Are What You Love, Smith notes in one research report:  When they analyzed brain activity…they found that “the Apple products are triggering the same bits of their brains as religious imagery triggers in a person of faith.”   This is your brain on Apple:  it looks like it’s worshiping, Smith points out.

Keep the phone in perspective as it is:  a valuable device, but just a tool to be used.  May we be wise in how we invest our time and relationships, aware of all the glittery distractions, careful of the undertow, and conscious of not just what we are doing but what it is doing to us. 

 

All things are lawful,

but not all things are helpful.

All things are lawful,

but not all things build up.

               1 Corinthians 10. 23