Borrowing from David Foster-Wallace, my argument in the previous post was that the phone allows us to worship connection such that we cannot help but feel lonely, just as the worship of money invariably makes us feel we never have enough.
But we also have the phone when we are more alone than were our ancestors. Unlike everyone who came before us, we cannot escape into the idea of some new place, new meeting. That’s done. It’s just us.
With the planet explored and measured down to the inch, the adventure and romance once promised by a horizon have been lost. Any place you might escape to comes with a map and a YouTube review of why you should escape there. No doubt the frantic way people traveled (before COVID anyway), checking things off some list of experieces was the finding yourself equivalent of having friends on Facebook.
Once a horizon of its own kind, our miraculous trips to the moon and Mars now confirm the universe as just too damn big. We may inch into space and build a base somewhere, but given the laws of physics and biology, even eons of scientific advancement won’t shorten the distances enough for us to meet galactic neighbors who could offer us an upgrade from Elon Musk and Richard Branson. How much we resist this reality can be seen in the entertainment dollars we spend on Star Trek and Star Wars and Marvel, where new friends are but a wormhole away.
Our heating climate locks us into a reality we do not care to acknowledge too, of course. Those who deny global warming often convinced that God watches over them such that they do not really need to reflect on how alone we are here on this one earth.
A hotter tomorrow is a terrible mirror of who we are but the point is that the mirror we most wish to avoid is the one that says it is only us or, in the case of the phone, only me.
In a sense, the phone compacts the modern dilemma and allows us to carry it with us. To simplify you might say that Galileo began (or captured) modernism—500 years of anxiety now coming to its apotheosis— when he made us something other than the center of the universe. Marx dismantled the myth of nation and Einstein made time relative and Freud recast the mind as unknown to itself and Nietzsche pointed to the god we had obviously killed. Whoops. Our ways of organizing the world and the self get undone overnight and anxiety became the norm. Stanely Cavell put it best:
It does look, after the death of kings and out of the ironies of revolutions and in the putrefaction of God, as if our trouble is that there used to be answers and now there are not. The case is that there used to be an unlimited questions and now there is.
But even in Kafka, who captured loneliness and how trapped we are in it better than anyone, the desperation was comic before it was obsessive. The Trial K can’t parse or the body Gregor Samsa can’t get out of are part of a world in which myth and meaning no longer connect, word unmoors from world because unlimited questions leave us dumb or angry or desperate.
Every desperate use of the phone reminds me of that unlimited question: Am I alone?
Until we find a better way to try and address that question than WhatsApp and Tik Tok, the use of the phone on trains I despise will go on. But, needless to say, that will not be the worst of it.