iThink, Therefore iPhone: The Paradox of Proximity
Musings
The Paradox of Proximity
We built the fastest world that has ever existed. So why does it feel so far away.
The phone buzzed once against the table and her hand moved before her mind did.
Across from her, a man was still talking. Something about his week. His father. A decision he had not made yet. She caught maybe half of it. The rest went the way most things go now, unheard, replaced by a small blue light.
I have sat at that table. So have you.
Here is what nobody tells you about the future we ordered. It arrived. Overnight shipping. Same day everything. A stranger's whole life folded into a rectangle you can hold in one hand and ignore with the other. We built the fastest world that has ever existed, and somehow we are lonelier in it than our grandparents were with a party line and a letter that took two weeks to arrive.
We did not lose connection. We lost the parts in between.
I used to wait for things. A movie to finally come to the theater near my house. A song to play again on the radio, because I could not just find it. The waiting was not empty. It was where you lived while you waited. Now the waiting is gone, and something else went with it.
Call it patience. Call it whatever you want. It is the thing that used to sit next to boredom and let you get bored enough to actually notice your own life.
The silence on a long car ride used to mean something. So did a letter, when every word cost you something, because paper was not free and neither was the stamp. What we have now is not less connection. It is connection with all the waiting cut out of it. Turns out the waiting was doing something.
I am not going to stand here and tell you to throw your phone in a lake. I like my phone. I like calling my mother from a country she has never seen and hearing her laugh like she is in the next room. That part was never the problem.
The problem is the reaching. The way your hand moves before you have decided to move it. The way a dinner with someone you love quietly becomes two people, each alone, each somewhere else, sitting six inches apart.
Here is the only trick I know. Put the phone somewhere you cannot reach without standing up. That is it. That is the whole hack. Stand up. Walk to the counter. Feel your legs under you. And somewhere in that short walk, you might remember there was a person across the table who was still talking. Who is still talking. Who has been waiting this whole time for you to look up.
We are not drifting apart because we found new galaxies to chase. We are drifting apart one small blue light at a time.
The good news, if there is any, is that the fix was never complicated. Look up. Stay a little longer. Let the waiting do what it was always doing.