Weren’t You?

“Put that phone down!”

It’s for your own good. One could even say it’s for your phone good but that doesn’t mean one should say that. But phone addiction is a real phenomenon.

Addiction, surprisingly, has a low bar, as far as meeting the definition.

To wit:

Addiction is characterized by inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional emotional response.
(via https://www.asam.org/resources/definition-of-addiction)

A low bar is hard in the limbo and it also ain’t good for being addiction to something.

And addiction is never good Captain Obvious. Never. Even if you are addicted to cereal with a ton of fiber.

Why?

See the definition above and know that by definition, addiction doesn’t come without "significant problems.”

Even if the problems result from something that started out as seemingly innocuous, like high-fiber cereal or…getting a cell phone.

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people and cell phones in and of themselves aren’t bad or evil or worthy of becoming a luddite but, again, addiction, ahem, ain’t good.

And people are addicted to their phones.

I see it in the classes when I teach; college students either itching to look at their phones or flat out looking at their phones while the world could burn down around them.

Now knowing that addiction requires the preposition “to” and that the noun to which one is addicted, matters, a lot, the thing that really frightens me about cell phone addiction is best expressed by Questlove Thompson:

"Dare I hesitate to say that creativity might be in jeopardy because one of the key components of being creative is boredom and silence and isolation."
(via https://www.npr.org/2018/05/01/600852801/questlove-aims-to-save-your-brain-creativity-might-be-in-jeopardy)

Cell Phone = no boredom, no silence, and no isolation.

You do the math.

Just don’t use your phone to do the math because we both know that will turn into the fall down the rabbit hole of checking your apps and tweeting and instagramming and pokemoning and tweeting about pokemining and the next thing you know it’s time for bed and your brain won’t shut off because of all the blue light and there is after all a new Netflix show you can stream till 6am upon which you will enter tomorrow zombie-like and…

You see? How it dominoes?

And all those dominoes falling could be the
[record scratch]
death
[woman screams]
of
[audience gasps into hot, very hot, condenser mic]
creativity.

And what do you think led to the cell phone that will be the death of creativity?

You guessed it: boredom, silence, and isolation.

I think we’re in the upside down Toto. [mixed reference = grade of A+]

So set a weekly schedule, set a daily timer, make it a reward, moderate usage via an app, but remember that the will needs practice and…

PUT THAT PHONE DOWN!

We need you to put that phone down. You were meant for bigger things than snapchat.

Weren’t you?



via GIPHY

Not A Choice

I wrote about the will here

And I asked “is choice at all a meaningful concept for addicts?

I guess it is up to a supreme court to decide:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-latest-court-eyes-drug-free-probation-order-challenge/2017/10/02/ea4c7124-a784-11e7-9a98-07140d2eed02_story.html?utm_term=.2ccd6f615bab

http://www.wbur.org/news/2017/09/24/probation-drug-test-sjc

“...she was unfairly punished because her relapse was the result of a disease, not a choice.”

I ask you dear reader, what is happening to free will?

What are the parameters of your quote unquote choices?

I also asked in the post noted above: “Is choice a meaningful concept in obesity?”

Consider: 40 Percent of Cancers Are Related to Being Overweight, Says Study

https://www.menshealth.com/health/cancers-linked-to-obesity

 

Commute, Cornell

My daily two-hour commute is just a fucking drag.

But let us add some key ingredients to, oh I don’t know, build character. 

        1.  Record heat in New England on Thursday 

By BOB SALSBERG, Associated Press

BOSTON (AP) — Heat records were burning up Thursday in cities in the Northeast as the region gets a summer preview.

The mercury reached 92 degrees in Boston shortly after noon Thursday, breaking the old record of 91 degrees for May 18 set in 1936, according to the National Weather Service.

2.  The AC in my near-200k-mileage car decided to just blow air sans all of that, oh I don’t know, cool, along with it. So I had to sweat like I was in a sauna for two hours yesterday and probably went closer to deaf from driving with the windows down.

Builds character, remember?

But, as I drove through the Bay state this morning up and onto the Braga Bridge where the sound of the pavement roared over the radio that was already up to 11, a beautiful thing happened: the very cool air from the water below filled the car along with the faintest whiff of salt, and for a minute I was one content commuter.

I’ll take a minute.

I don’t know a lot about Chris Cornell and I wasn’t a huge grunge fan from back in the day but I read some stuff about him over the years and knew that he suffered from depression and addiction. I also knew that he had talent, unadulterated, from-the-womb talent. 

So while not a huge fan and while it was hard to hear (please see above for reasons why windows were down), when the Providence rock station played a portion of his isolated vocal track to Black Hole Sun, I cried.

Build character, right?