Leave Your Phone in the Locker

Sunday morning, 10:17 am. I scan my digital wristband across the sensor of the locker assigned to me by a beaming Nordic Spa staff member. I have a Sunday off, so my wife and I have made the short trek to the Rocky Mountains for a bit of time away. I examine my surroundings. The locker room is immaculate. There are private showers, complimentary bathroom amenities, unlimited towels, earnest staff members everywhere, all eager to help me relax, restore, refocus, reclaim, rejuvenate, re-everything. Before heading out for a day of “hydrotherapy” (which will include exotic steam cabins with names like “Alchemist” and “Eucalyptus,” Finnish saunas, “reflection pools” (as in, “pools in which to reflect” not “pools that you can see your reflection in”), and “exfoliation cabins,” I am exhorted to leave my phone in the locker.

“Disconnect to reconnect” is the mantra of the spa. It is emblazoned across the t-shirts of the staff members who offer their assistance in whispered therapeutic tones. There are reminders on signage throughout the spa. Later, I will observe that at least a few people seem happy to ignore this bit of advice. I will see people lounging around on chairs in our spa-issued robes staring at their phones. Maybe they are reading Thich Nhat Hanh and learning about mindfulness. More likely, they’re churning through reels on Instagram.

I place my phone in the locker and head out to see what the day will hold.

Monday morning, 9:42 am. I fish out my prison-issued locker key from the bottom of my bag. There is a haggard-looking woman in the reception area, maybe waiting for a visit, maybe looking to leave a bit of money on someone’s account? The receptionist greets me absently. She’s only been there a few weeks and she already looks bored. To the left of my locker is a large sign urging me to learn how to administer naloxone. I open my locker, take off my hat (not allowed), my keys, and my wallet inside. I take out the key to my office door and clip on my ID tag.

I place my phone in the locker and head out to see what the day will hold.

The contrast between the two experiences is quite stark, obviously. On Sunday, I was encouraged to leave my phone in my locker for “wellness” purposes. My phone would prevent me from experiencing all the benefits the spa had to offer. I’d be too busy playing games or checking sports scores or responding to email to breathe in the alpine air and focus properly on the steam and the heat and the arctic plunges that were allegedly ridding my body of all kinds of nasty toxins. My phone would not contribute to the peaceful bliss and de-stressing that the day was meant to provide.

On Monday, I was not “encouraged” to leave my phone in my locker. It’s not optional. Once I make my way through the scanner there is a “No cell phones allowed” sign displayed prominently before the first locked door. My wellness is not exactly a high priority here. This disconnection is not so that I can “reconnect.” All communication is obviously highly restricted. Here, the prohibition on phones is for security reasons (for staff) and for disciplinary reasons (inmates).

We hear a lot about “digital detox” these days. Or maybe “digital sabbaths” for the more religiously inclined. Taking some time away from the phone, unplugging, going off social media for a fixed amount of time, etc. We all know that our phones aren’t good for us, that they don’t bring out the best in us, that they’re basically destroying the mental and spiritual health of everyone under thirty. We recognize, at least on a conceptual level, that we should probably spend a bit less time on our phones than we do. But we tend not to do anything about it.

Unless we’re forced to. Having these two experiences back-to-back was instructive for me. Even though the motivation for the digital sabbaths was wildly different, the effect in both cases was positive. I attend more fully to the world and to those around me when I don’t have the option of defaulting to my phone. I say this even as someone who has been off social media for nearly four years. The potential distractions don’t end once Facebook, Instagram, etc. and all their siren songs have been taken out of the equation. The devices themselves are designed to be distracting, to constantly be pulling our eyeballs back to the screen. Just like Las Vegas doesn’t exactly work if people gamble in moderation, so smartphones and the tech industry have little interest in people using their tools for merely functional reasons. Enslavement is the business model.

I came across two articles this morning that reminded me of the stakes involved in how we live in the digital age. The first was a paragraph from a piece in Mere Orthodoxy:

We live in a technological moment in which it is very ease to embrace a false simplicity and rush to judgment. We are formed in such a way by many of our tools and online networks to view argument and debate not as a shared exploration of the world in which we seek the truth with our fellow men and women, but rather as a kind of public performance one attempts in order to lift up oneself, to acquire power and influence, to triumph over one’s enemies. To be reflective in our current moment is difficult and will likely require many of us to change our habits of technological use and media consumption.

It’s not just that we become slaves to distraction; we also engage with the world differently. We treat our lives as a performance for public consumption (literally). We desperately try to lift ourselves up, often at the expense of putting others down. We become so very eager to judge and so enamoured with false binaries and simplistic answers.

The second was from an imagined commencement address which pondered the question of why, if we are materially better off than most people at most times in human history, we are all so unhappy:

We economists call this phenomenon “relative wealth concerns” or “keeping up with the Joneses.” These are just fancy terms to describe a simple psychological fact: we are constantly busy comparing ourselves to our peer group and feel bad when we fall short in that comparison.

Peer group is an essential term in the previous sentence. No one cares that they’re enormously better off than their grandparents; they just care that they’re worse off than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. You don’t feel wealthy, despite the fact the median human lives on the equivalent of $5,000 per year. Yes, you read that right. Imagine if you lived in the U.S. but spent only $5K a year at current U.S. prices, and you’ve imagined the life of the median human today. Your “peer group” isn’t humanity; it’s social media influencers and billionaires, and you are deeply unsatisfied when comparing your lives to theirs.

You live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, yet you feel economic anxiety. The late Charlie Munger summarized it succinctly: “The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy.” And in this era of instantaneous communication networks and social media, envy has been put into hyperdrive.

Envy has indeed been put into hyperdrive. And our phones have played no small part in this. It’s hard to imagine how an endlessly updating digital record of all the people who are smarter and prettier and wealthier and more successful than us, people who have nicer houses and cuter dogs and better abs and more followers than us could do anything but turn us into more envious people. And people less-tethered to actual reality, where we are materially better off than most people for most of human history.

We are becoming malformed human beings. And it is having catastrophic mental, spiritual, and social consequences. Whether we are forced to or encouraged to, I am convinced that we need to unplug far more often than we do. Our lives may just depend upon it.

What, you may be wondering, were the fruits of my enforced disconnection over the last few days? Well, on Sunday I did indeed enjoy a lovely day of hydrotherapy in the Rocky Mountains. I read a novel. I had some good conversations with my wife. I ate a sandwich with arugula in it. I got a sunburn. And on Monday, I was able to be fully present with men in a hard place, to encounter Jesus together, to listen, to pray.

All, totally worth it.