look up

or for fuck's sake, just put down your phone

At least once, nearly every day lately, I get the profound urge to roundhouse kick my phone through a fucking window. And then follow it outside and go full Office Space on its ass until it’s nothing but a pile of powerless, pitiful, plastic.

You?

After four years at sea I am back on dry land and living in a house, driving a car, and doing all the normal stuff I always used to do without thinking, but internally much of it still strikes me as novel (carrying keys?) or strange (self-checkouts?) or even scary (highways?!), after not doing any of this for so many years. One of the biggest standouts of these many adjustments back to ‘normal life’, hands down, has been dealing with my PHONE.

If you’re anything like me (and the rest of America) in this department, chances are good that most days, your phone is the first thing see in the morning and the last thing you see before falling asleep, the thing you reach for when you can’t sleep at 3am, the thing you carry with you around the house all day, from the bedroom to the kitchen to the couch to the bathroom and back again. It’s the thing you absolutely will not leave the home without, even for a walk or a run, and you don’t drive anywhere without first plugging your destination into your phone, then you go where the phone tells you to go and then once you’ve arrived and parked, you check your phone. It’s the thing you reach for when you’re bored or anxious, depressed or lonely, confused or curious, the thing you reach for for no reason at all but just because it’s there, or when you simply experience more than six whole seconds where nothing else in your immediate environment is satisfactorily interesting or stimulating, no matter where you are or who you are with.

And it’s not just my phone that I want to murder, but everyone else’s fucking phone, too. While at red lights I look around and everyone in their car next to me is on their phone, people are on their phone in parking lots before getting out of their cars and then again after returning to their cars before driving off. I see everyone else’s phone glowing on the faces around me while I eat at restaurants, while I sit in waiting rooms, while I stand in line, while I’m walking down the sidewalk, and don’t even get me started on how often I see someone driving a car or crossing a street while looking down at their phone.

There seems to be an explosion in the amount of (brilliant!) articles and essays¹ I’ve seen and read recently on our culture’s loss of meaning, how our lives and spirits have been flattened by a toxic cocktail of capitalism and the internet, how social media is feeding into our many shades of divisiveness and loneliness, and what the attention economy is costing us. And many of you have read my own dissertation/manifesto/e-book/impassioned rage rant that I wrote on the perils of Instagram and social media specifically, back in 2021 when I closed my professional account on the platform after the whole thing suddenly clicked into view for me as an upside down carnival of high school style group think, morality policing, aspirational consumerism, and identity calcification (among other things) that turned our private lives into movie sets and was blatantly tanking our individual and collective wellbeing and communication all while adding more billions to the bank account of one (1) man.

So anyway, none of this is new — I’ve been thinking and sharing about this stuff for years, and so have many (many!) other people, most of whom are far more articulate than I am on these matters. What I think is new is the sheer volume of announcements I’m seeing from other people also quitting Instagram or all social platforms for good — even (especially), from those with larger followings who used it primarily for work, like me. It’s slowly starting to feel like we’re approaching the edge of a cultural shift re: social media. It’s finally happening, and I love to see it.

But I’m realizing that this is about much more than just social media.

It’s about the ways our phones have morphed from a cool tool to a crutch to a concrete barrier standing between us and our own bodies, between us and the person across the table from us, between us and the world. It’s about our chronic overuse of our phones and all that we have lost because of it — it’s subtle, but it’s substantial.

Right now, if I could put anything on a billboard for everyone to see and consider; if you asked me what the simplest but most powerful step was that you could take today to instantly improve the quality of your life by orders of magnitude, it would be:

Put down your phone.

Let’s time travel wayyy way back to the Days of Yore (c. 1999)….

Do you remember when you would think of an interesting question (why does the earth’s magnetic north move? Can you really eat the skin of a kiwi?) and then had to carry that question around within you, taking your best guesses at the answer, wondering and pondering until you found a library or a desktop computer or a human who might know something on the matter? Do you remember when you navigated by map on road trips, or had to rely on your own instincts to locate that new restaurant on the far side of town, or had to stop and ask someone for directions when you got lost?

Do you remember watching the news for one hour a day or less, when you would read books or newspapers or other long form pieces, when we all pretty much watched the same handful of tv shows? When you would call a friend or family member’s house and someone else would answer the phone and you would politely speak with them first before the phone was handed to your friend? Do you remember waking up in the morning and gently transitioning from the wild depths of dreamworld back into your ‘self’?

Most importantly… do you remember how those experiences felt?

Listen, I know I sound like the salty old man talking about how things were better back in MY day, and I don’t mean to say that all this technology is terrible. I’m not suggesting that we throw away our phones (but wow imagine if the whole country went one week together without smartphones or screens of any kind?). But what’s striking to me about this list of analog experiences isn’t so much that they are now almost entirely obsolete — but that with each of these notable disappearances, they have taken with them a portal through which we used to be in direct contact with the real, living, physical, immediate world, both within and around us.

In other words, I do not think that it’s a coincidence that our mental and spiritual wellbeing, or the sense of emptiness, hollowness, or meaninglessness that so many are feeling in their lives at this moment has worsened as our reliance on our phones has increased, and it’s not just because of the scrolling.

By over-relying on our phones (for information, navigation, communication, entertainment, and literally everything else in between) we have come to under-rely on others and our own bodies. Our phones have become our guides, teachers, pacifiers, and Reality Escape Hatches — and as such, we have come to distance ourselves even further from our own wildness, and from the people with whom we share our rooms, towns, and lives.

In my last newsletter, I shared with you how my move back to land has felt like I’ve moved from the Real World to People/Pretend World: out there my life revolved entirely around storms and whales and reefs and wind and humans and shorelines. And here, my life now revolves around human-made ideas and abstractions, mostly found in my phone: news, politics, trends, recipes, celebrity updates, money, culture and markets: knowledge.

Out there the earthly elements were what kept me stimulated, and now not having the feeling of the wind on my face 24/7 or a storm to track on the horizon has left a void. And while most people might not have something this extreme to contrast against to help elucidate it, I believe they are also sensing this same exact void. And ironically, the first thing we reach for in an effort to fill it, is our phone.

Catherine Shannon articulates this commonly felt lack of connection, of meaninglessness, of apathetic disinterest in most of ‘real life’ these days:

So many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots, the list goes on.

- Everyone is Numbing Out (highly recommend reading her whole piece)

As I see it, this culture-wide numbing out is due in large part to a multi-dimensional severance between us and our aliveness, and the fact that engaging with any feature of the world that sits below our necks or outside our windows is now entirely optional. We can buy groceries, get therapy, talk to friends, shop for a coat or a couch, work, and do everything we “need” through our phones.

Nothing matters anymore because nothing exists anymore, except for what’s inside your phone. We have been corralled up into our thinky minds amassing knowledge and Reels and podcasts and news and while we’ve been busy up there, we’ve barely even noticed the mass extinction happening on the ground floor of our lives — the loss of most of the ways that we used to have to (get to!) actually engage and exist within our real bodies, with real people, in the real world.

We have become disembodied. We have confused the map for the territory.

The 90’s movie Office Space paints the portrait of most people’s actual nightmare: the gray, sterile, cubicle-bound existence, the soul-sucking, Groundhog Day monotony of exchanging a life for a paycheck, of being a faceless cog in a machine built to support someone else’s bottom line and dreams at the cost of one’s own spiritual health, where who we really are is relegated to our increasingly narrowing pockets ‘free time’ outside of the drone of work. But this disconnected state of existential dissatisfaction has now taken over every waking moment of our free time too (literally in the bathroom with us!) — but we don’t recognize it because instead of gray walls and TPS Reports it is the visual circus of TikTok and the constantly updating world news (that we must keep up with lest we become uniformed). The cubicle is shinier but the soul-sucking and responses are the same: the growing desire to smash our phones with a sledgehammer and liberate ourselves from this virtual reality hell and walk free somewhere where we can feel the fucking grass under our feet.

And that’s exactly what I’m sensing that we’re the most hungry for right now, and that I am certainly hungry for, especially after returning from a life at sea: to come into contact with something real again, to feel something, to be a part of something, to connect with the mundane and the magical. To not just ‘touch grass’ but to dig my hands all the way into the dirt.

When I look around an airport and every face is bowed into the blue glow, I see hundreds of people silently saying the world I belong to isn’t up here with you. And I want to scream just a little bit because this unspoken sentiment is so clearly responsible for the agony of our loneliness and apathy and growing distance between ourselves and nature and other people, and the answers to who am I? and what’s important? and what even matters? cannot be found in there.

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it's worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.

— Miranda July

I really believe that there’s a part of every one of us that is sensitive to and clear about what has been lost when Our World shifts from what’s outside our window to what’s inside our phone.

More of us are noticing what scrolling social media does to us somatically: the tightening and tensing, the notes of jealousy or outrage or fomo. I think we are starting to feel the nebulous grief around what has been lost when our friendships are maintained solely through a back and forth hearting of each other’s posts on an app, or when congratulations and birthday wishes and condolences and holidays are shared over text and DMs instead of phone calls or visits or letters.

I think we’re beginning to notice how little we notice about our physical surroundings when we’re following a GPS instead of finding our own way through a place, when we’re too busy documenting a moment to experience it, or how our attention is fractured even when we’re not even on our phone — how just knowing it’s in our pocket will leak attention away from what’s in front of us.

And if you’re not consciously aware of this, your nervous system absolutely is. The burnout, fatigue, stress, anxiety, and constant feelings of overwhelm that so many people are struggling with right now can be traced back, in large part, to the nonstop inundation of noise emanating from our precious rectangles — and in turn, the grounding nourishment of real connections with the earth under our feet, with strangers and friends, with the moments of quiet presence and rest that have been edged out of our lives almost entirely, because of it.

And hey — if you’ve been that person who can’t sit in a waiting room or at a red light without looking at your phone, I want to be clear that I am not blaming you here. I have also been that person, we all have. And this is really the crux of my point: billions of dollars, the brightest minds, and entire industries are working overtime to convince you more and more that you need your phone, that you can’t leave the house without it, the world you really belong to lives in there. Convenience and ease are the digital trojan horses in which a slow, steady severance between you and the veracity of your existence are concealed.

I know that complex problems don’t often have simple solutions and that our current issues as a country and as individuals, especially as they relate to our lack of fulfillment and our ambient disconnection from everything, are an amalgam of countless factors (idk.. late-stage capitalism, the rising costs of housing/living, the election, climate change and the annihilation of the earth, the 24 hour news cycle, the worship of work and productivity, and 87 other things?) but since moving back to land I can’t help but feel that if I had to distill my thoughts down to one thing about how we might best navigate this moment in time, it would be: the world you belong to isn’t in your phone, it is all around you, right now.

The world you belong to is your body, being breathed, in this moment. It is your neighbor, it is the birds soaring through the sky, it is the strangers who are dining in the same restaurant or strolling the same sidewalk or waiting to board their flight with you, it is your imagination and curiosity and intuition, it’s the gravity in your limbs, the iron in your blood, the stars overhead, it is your relationships. This is the thread that connects you to everything in this universe.

And therefore, if we are, in fact, hungry for something real, we have to make an effort to not only take our phones out of our hands but take our heads out of our phones — to arrive back in our bodies, and come into contact with the place we are and the people we share it with. Because whether it feels like it or not, we are sharing something: this moment, this meal, this human experience, this town, this earth. And there’s something deeply important and sacred about that fact.

To close, I ask you to consider what I’ve been asking myself lately:

What do you want in this life? What world do you actually want to live in? A world of wind and ravens and oak trees or a world of comment sections and headlines and opinions? A world of candlelight and shared laughter and moonrises or a world of notifications and email and instagram captions? I don’t mean to present a false binary — I do think it is absolutely possible to live in both — but if the last decade or two has taught us anything, it’s that it’s far too easy for the digital to subsume everything else, and it will only get worse from here. So we must be persistent and intentional and aware of the ways the use of our phones is actively removing from our lives the very things our souls are furiously longing for.

Because the truth is that if we continue reaching for our phone at any sign of boredom, awkwardness, or uncertainty, we will never get to know the magic that lies on the other side, we’ll never see what happens when we’re asked to go deep with what and who is here, instead of going broad and shallow with the limitless noise in our screens. The truth is that the meaning and connection and depth and significance we’re aching for so desperately in this life are far, far closer than we think — it’s all right here, right in front of our faces, hiding in plain sight — all we have to do is look up.

xo,

Taylor

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”

- Sylvia Plath

P.S. On an upcoming podcast episode, I am sharing some of the things that I have been doing to help restore this balance, so if you’re interested in that, join me over on Rewilding.

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What’s your relationship with your phone felt like lately? Have you also wanted to frisbee it off a bridge? Have you found ways to limit how much of your humanness it eats up? Leave a comment and join the conversation:

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1. Would you want me to compile this list of essays and articles in one place for you? LMK