How our phones can steal our vision

Have you ever looked up from your phone – you were just “going to do one thing” – and realized 20 minutes have mysteriously passed?

Have you ever put down your phone after scrolling for a while and had to remind yourself of where you are and what you were doing (before you picked it up)?

I’m guessing yes.

I’m also guessing that you already know that our phones can cast a spell over us. They lure us in, and we can become absorbed in them. Too much time spent scrolling can send us into a stupor.

I always think of this great line by the poet Samuel Coleridge:

“With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:

And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?”

 I’m not sure what Coleridge’s spell was, way back in 1825 when he wrote his poem. But I know what mine is: my phone.

When we get sucked into our phone’s vortex, one effect is that we get stuck like a cog in the wheel. And this stickiness makes us lose our sense of vision - our ability to picture a world that doesn’t yet exist.

How does this happen, exactly? Here are three ways overuse of our phones rob us of vision:

1. We become passive… and this makes us disinterested in planning.

Our phones do everything for us. We find that we rarely or never do have to plan ahead or remember information, because “there’s an app for that”. The quicker and more efficient our phones make our lives, the more we lose our motivation to be proactive, look ahead, and make plans. (Interestingly, this is the main reason that my friend Jen Whitmer says she waits till 8th grade to give her children phones; she finds that phones inhibit future planning skills, and she wants to make sure they know how to make and enact plans without the crutch of their phones. Hear more in our interview here.)

2. We get tethered to the small dramas of the present moment.

Our phones focus us solely on the here and now. The immediacy of the drama and entertainment that comes in constant streams from our phones limits us, trapping us in the present. This stalls out our growth and development as a human, and it prevents us from thinking about the bigger pictures of our lives. The bigger questions seems irrelevant and boring compared to whatever we see unfolding on the screen in our hand.

3. We lose our imagination.

When we’re always a spectator, we never have to flex our ‘creator’ muscles. We consume and consume, and our vision for actually generating something new ebbs away. Our creativity gets lost, swept away in the endless stream of our watching, scrolling, clicking, and viewing. The couch we sit on and our slick, handheld portal entrap us, and together they become the gallows of our imagination.

All this adds up to a travesty.

We were made to be people of vision - creating, setting goals, bettering our lives (and the lives of those around us). We are each given one whole life to lead and a whole world to explore. How does it help us if our favorite device and “toy” takes all that away from us? This is a loss both for ourselves and for the whole world.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (Mary Oliver)

Let’s keep phones in their place and keep ourselves outside their spells. Let’s set limits on them, so that our time isn’t wasted and our creativity isn’t stolen. Let’s be the creative, imaginative, proactive people we were made to be.

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