There is a tactile sensation of disconnection that comes with a phone for me. This could be a singular experience, perhaps a story I carry with me is set aside when the phone gets turned off. It is akin to having woken from sleep after days when one is exhausted and finally realizing how tired one had been. In this case it as if the weight of a million connections and threads has suddenly been taken away. If I am alone in a house, I don’t find I actually feel alone until the phone is off. Until the illusion that I can just reach out and connect with any of those people is taken away, the weight of it is there.

This is the sensation that has prompted the current experiment dabbling with being a luddite. For if my sense of connection with the broader community can be manipulated by changing my relationship with my phone, there is a suspicious undertone here that all those connections are actually just with the device. My friend James, who I see daily, and text often, doesn’t live in my phone. If he leaves the gym I don’t suddenly feel like my connection with him has been affected in any way. After all, we are both the universe, how could either of us actually be less connected with the whole? Yet, what a bizarre thing if I feel less connected to him when my device is suddenly off.

What if for just a moment we allow this ludicrous notion sit in the air. What if our phones have begun to masquerade as our friends and family, and very slowly we have started to invest far more time in our relationship with our devices than with the actual people. Perhaps this is why there is an urge to text the person who isn’t in the room as opposed to talk with the real life human across from you. It isn’t the person you are texting, it is just the tiny box demanding that you stroke it in front of your loved one. Some gross act of PDA that somehow largely gets accepted because we are all largely complicit to it.

If you want to see a codependent relationship, look no further than the one you have with the tippity-tappity box that you can’t leave the house without. Hell, I have heard friends comment about ‘leaving it in another room’ when they are trying to work. As if the act of not being in the same room with your device is some great degree of disconnection. The majority of us will turn around and drive home if we discover we have left our box at home. I certainly know that most days I spend more hours in a day focused on my phone than I do on anyone else in my life. Yet the only way this is really possible is because I can believe the story that I am furthering my relationships with other people, and not just with my box.

Spend an evening sharing food and laughter with people. It revitalizes and fills the spaces in us. We feel lighter and more full. Yet, two hours of texting and checking messages in no way fills that void. Even if it gives the sense of greater connection with our community. Perhaps though, the only relationship we are deepening is the ones we have with our devices. So this is why my phone is off right now. It is why I haven’t looked at it yet today. It seems like time to start investing all that mental energy into the real world and not into a seductive box which masquerades as my friends so that it can convince me to buy things.