Scrolling Through Your Brain and Accidentally Liking It

If I took the smartphone right out of your hand today and never gave it back to you until the day before you died, would you still be able to charge it or would it be so outdated that no one would know how to turn it on anymore? (Just kidding)

My actual question is: how much would you loose?

Would you lose the only way of connection to a friend or family member? Would you loose their home address too or do you have that saved somewhere else? Would anyone be able to contact you?

Would you loose all the photos you took of a sunny day in Tokyo?

Would you loose screenshots of an important conversation?

Would you loose all your banking information?

Would you loose your job?

If I took your smartphone away without any warning, how much would you know beyond it?

Could you direct me on a road trip across the country, to a specific seaside Bed & Breakfast, that holds your 4-day-weekend reservation?

Could you recall the phone number of your sister?

Could you recite anything you’ve learnt on duolingo?

Could you remember anyone’s birthdays?

With a full impression that this opinion is highly unpopular (my presumptions based upon it involving fewer Snapchat filters and including more of the mental math you learnt in 4th grade), I still have a side perspective l’d like to offer. In the day of social media and the age of instant-or-nothing, I present to you an unpopular opinion: choosing to live without a smartphone.

To walk to the nearest pizza store, and order it in person. To go outside in the morning to feel the weather. To write out your thoughts in a journal with pages, and send letters to friends in various countries far away. To follow street signs, to roll down your window to ask people for directions when you’ve miss read the street sign, and to listen to the radio with commercials. To meet people through bumping into them on the bus, or standing in line waiting for a concert venue to open.

I understand how a smartphone has made a seemingly complicated life, practically painless (and as newer apps are released to effortlessly remove every time consuming responsibility) easier by the day. But am I the only millennial who wishfully dreams of a day without first-world-problems, and a slower pace of life? Am I an alien out there in a sea of fellow humans who itches for everything to be a little more challenging on purpose and to not have instant access to anything I want or need?

I have an addiction to doing things in complicated way- for the pure pleasure of fighting an unknown, and the after high that comes when it works out. I have a yearning within me to have hidden obstacles throughout the day, believing that I am furthermore developing my sense of intuition. I guess you could say, I long to be the inventor of my own life.

Yes, it is faster, and simpler, and most times a whole lot more practical- to type an address in, and have the best route planned out in mere seconds. However, would you be able to do that without a tool to do it for you? Does anyone else feel a paled sense of embarrassment to rely on a smartphone to do something instead of rising to the task of figuring it out on your own? On this planet where everything can be googled, researched and found instantaneously, is there any reason to go about things in an old fashioned way?

I have a love for human connections that are not prearranged. The moments in life you can not in a million years plan for—yet the entirety of the universe, and the circumstances & fate of the day, together in harmony, lighten-bolt-strike you with a bit of enthusiasm and a memory that will leave you nostalgic forever.

I have a love for hearing a song I heard once, many years before, (perhaps from my childhood) and not being able to ”Shazam“ it. Instead, waiting and hoping that I might catch it again somewhere, playing at the gas station, or while I’m waiting in the dentists’ office.

And I have a strange fascination to be lost...to be stuck somewhere, where no one can find me. To stumble into a place that I do not know or never heard of, to take in all of what surrounds me at that moment, just for what I see it as. To be where I've walked to, came to, and (I like to imagine) discovered by all myself.

Now if I gave you back your smartphone— (after reading this, and not at the end of your life)

are you breathing a sigh of relief? Or maybe you have a suddenly strange urge to check when your last iCloud back up was.

Or possibly you‘ve asked yourself this question:

as much as this device can give you,

is there anything it takes away?