What does that cartoon at the top have to do with an article in the Travel section of the New York Times? They are related, I am convinced!
I read the article that I am talking about on the morning of June 22, 2024, and then found the above cartoon, popped up on my Facebook page, before I had a chance to write out my reaction to the article in The Times.
Today, my blog posting is really about that travel article, which caught my attention immediately. Here is the picture from The Times that I would have used, in writing about that article, had I not seen the cartoon before I began writing:
That scene above is truly lovely, isn't it? It's Costa Rica, by the way. I am not sure whether or not The New York Times will let non-subscribers read the article from which I purloined the picture, but here's a link, just in case:
That headline, above, suggests that without your phone, as used to document the reality of whatever it is you may be experiencing, it could be that such experience may not actually "happen" at all.
We were on a quintessential girl’s trip to Costa Rica. Together, we gulped icy drinks by the hotel pool, were battered by waves during a surf lesson, had our tarot cards read aboard a catamaran, and danced our hearts out, powered by espresso martinis, to early 2000s anthems on a rooftop.
But we didn’t capture any of this on our phones. No Instagram stories were posted of the fun being had. No TikToks either. We didn’t text photos to friends and family in far colder climates back home.
And if there wasn’t a picture, well, did it happen? I had wondered if a vacation without my phone would reprogram my iPhone-addled brain, whether it might deepen the connections I made or improve my travel experiences. So, in mid-April, I joined a group of 10 other women in their 20s and 30s for a four-day, phone-free tour of Costa Rica’s Guanacaste Province, on the country’s northwestern coast, a picturesque place of breathtaking beaches, tropical forests and, everywhere around you, the chance of a surreal wildlife sighting.
Christine Chung, who wrote up the article on the phone-free trip to Costa Rica, gave the trip a pretty good review, though she did reveal that a few of the "phone-free" travelers actually cheated. I was not much surprised to learn that - even given that lovely location, as revealed in the photo above.
The photo below, in a much more mundane street scene, shows the compulsive command that cellphones exercise over our attention. Surely anyone reading this blog posting will have seen lots of examples of what the following picture demonstrates. When we are cellphone equipped, we are not, primarily, interested in where we actually are, and in what we are actually doing in the "real world" that we physically inhabit. To the contrary, we are most consumed with the online substitute for that real world that we find on our cellphones.
What we might "lose" when we don't have our cellphones is what The Times' travel article was exploring. If we didn't take our phones on the trip, did it really happen? As the street scene photo makes us realize, however, we don't lose anything when we don't have a cellphone to distract us. In fact, the opposite is the case. WITH the cellphone, we lose contact with the physical reality that surrounds us. "Real life" is lost as we inhabit an online world that is more compelling than actual reality. That is true on a beautiful beach in Costa Rica, and on a gritty city street.
There is, I think, a kind of "theological" lesson to be drawn from the picture of the pedestrians buried in the screens of their cellphones. We live, ultimately, in the "World of Nature," the "World That God Created," as I sometimes call it. And THAT is the world we lose when we start living within our cellphones. Our cellphones usher us into a human creation that effectively eliminates the "real" world and substitutes a human-created simulacrum.
So.... as that cartoon at the top asks us: Do we want to replace our family with the unreal "reality" inside those phones? Do we want to "lose" our family?
In Costa Rica, and in school classrooms, and walking in the street, and when driving in your car, and when you are sitting around the family dinner table, you should think about what you are really "losing" when you start paying attention to your cellphone.
What are you losing?
Everything. Everything real! That whole wide "Natural World."
My take? It's not a good trade!
Foundation of Freedom
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