Less Phone. Less Ego.

As my day planner shouts errands, meetings and reminders (and my phone beeps with much of the same) I can't help but sometimes get sucked into the illusion of importance that is modern life. Suddenly, I'm running around town lightning fast. Juggling groceries with a phone glued to the palm of my hand. Obsessively checking the screen every five minutes because I might've let something slip...or wasn't someone supposed to call me?

No wonder so many people find themselves knee-deep in quarter-life, midlife and three-quarter-life crises. (Zipping around still, but just in a flashier car.) ;) No wonder we're all so tired. We're hyper-engaged. Married to our phones. More alert than my home security system. Worried that something will fall between the cracks and cause everything we stand for to come crumbling down, like the Colosseum.  

Eda Polat

But is it business that's really keeping us so busy or busy-ness itself? Because we all have all the information we need all the time, we're all expected to get more done. But what about what's beyond the screen? What happened to philosophy? To soul-searching? To living? To loving? To neighbors? To communities? To less me and more we? 

Even with the above said, I admit: I love my smart phone. It still amazes me that I can pull directions, talk into my phone and it types!, find where I'm parked, reach someone across the world, grab my email, scan a coupon...it's entirely unreal and separate from the world I grew up in, where I punched in a long-distance calling card and stretched the curly-Q cord all the way to my closet for privacy. But, in all honesty, it might do me some good to be a little more inaccessible in general and to have information be a tad less mobile – and not just for the reasons you probably think, like all the (good) ones stated in the paragraph above. But for this: an ego check. 

The world does not need us to save it with a deft click or press of a send button. It will keep on spinning if we don't pick up the phone, can't respond to that email or happen to lose fifteen minutes by getting completely lost in a sea of streets. We. Are. Human. Super humans, yes. But not superhuman. Frustrations and mistakes are supposed to crop up. We're supposed to have questions. We're supposed to walk around with our heads up. To need help. To not know it all. It's life, and, perhaps, the universe's way of humbling us and putting us firmly in our place. Which is right here, in the middle of everything, with everyone else – interconnected.