What if I Threw My Phone Out The Window
Nothing I do is counterculture
Every few months, I get the itch to digitally isolate myself.
And I scratch it more often than not: unfollow and remove followers, deactivate Instagram, depopulate LinkedIn, delete TikTok and Pinterest and all of the social cataloging apps that convince us that curation is the same as understanding.
It’s not a novel concept to go off the grid. And it’s not that I dislike social media—close friends know I’ve used it chronically and without shame.
But I think the accessibility to lives and opinions that aren’t my own is ruining me. I’m more agitated, rapidly judgmental, dangerously apathetic to what I don’t automatically hate when I’m online and it takes everything in me to not throw my phone out the window.
Someone told me the other day that I was so cool for not having Instagram anymore. Some researchers say disconnecting is a form of resistance; there’s a whole Reddit community for it.
It’s not really a compliment—there’s nothing counterculture about doing something strictly for yourself.
Back in March, I came across a video of a girl throwing a fit over how wrong it is to believe ‘we don’t owe anyone anything.’
She had overwhelming support in the comments: people upset that someone unfollowed them without removing them as a follower, people hurt by those who didn’t want to chat while waiting in line for coffee, people who blamed this mindset for the loneliness epidemic, for the rise of misanthropy, for the erosion of the social contract.
The response to the video was so loud it haunted me for weeks. I know the message means well—platitudes usually do—but the more I sat with it, the more I disagreed.
There’s too much focus on reciprocity these days and it dilutes what it means to meaningfully engage. I think one of the most beautiful things we can do is know that we don’t owe anyone anything, but giving anyway.
No one is entitled to what we don’t want to share; owed perpetual kindness or unwavering respect. I fear my hottest take is that platforms that make it easier to know more about you—which make people think that they know you—and platforms that make it easier to reach you—which create expectations for immediate interaction—flatten the human experience.
If offering less of yourself or your kindness makes you a worse person, then does offering everything because you feel like you have to make you a saint?
The more relevant contemplation, I guess, is how much of my life I am comfortable having online, how much of life online is real, and how real we are if life is a performance regardless of who it’s for.
Donald Miller writes in his book, Searching for God Knows What, that “I have sometimes wondered if the greatest desire of man is to be known and loved anyway.”
If so, then the creator economy is a booming byproduct of this desire for authenticity. Behind-the-scenes vlogs, “come with me” posts, confessions that make people feel like they know you, that you know them; it’s the kind of content that predictably does well. I’d argue it’s become commodified and, in that case, is anything online real.
They say our digital footprint is one of the most telling things about us and I’m convinced there’s truth in that. You are what you consume just as much as what you create. We consume most what we want to—or will never—live.
A friend of mine told me two Sundays ago that she doesn’t think people have biologically evolved fast enough to take in the rapid development of technology and accessible information.
The hypothesis wasn’t well-researched or scientifically proven on her end, but she claimed that its lens makes the world make more sense.
She didn’t mention it, but her point feels particularly relevant to the introduction of generative AI, which banks on accelerating human adaptation by outpacing our cognitive, biological, moral, political decision-making capabilities.
The speed is seductive. We’re able to think, decide, move faster at the cost of being intimate with a large language model and it’s addicting because it feels like the world is in our hands.
But Hua Hsu tells The New Yorker that “A.I. allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human” and he’s right: friction is a mortal experience.
There’s a generational texture to allowing ourselves to think and feel and create without the instant consolidation of what’s been thought and felt and created before. Perhaps the Amish have a point in believing modern technology empowers the common man to feel like he needs no one else. It makes him feel too much like God.
My current opinion is that we’re losing our ability to be human when we automate the parts of ourselves that require pause.
We lose even more when we’re unable to differentiate our own perspective and choices from those of others.
It’s an issue in a culture obsessed with hyper-individualism. I usually only angered my parents when I was younger when I displayed traits of being too Americanized: stubborn, self-sufficient, sensitive. Western orientation views being able to say “these are my choices, my values, my life” as a form of currency; I’d be filthy rich if I could still believe that I was the sole director of my own fate.
It’s ironic, if I think about it too hard, how that clashes now with our desperation for the immediate.
And if I’m not immediately receiving results on what I’m doing, the frustration of it all prompts the need for a break. The easiest break to take is to scroll on my phone and suddenly self-set alarms don’t matter because the algorithms know just how to numb my brain. I love being idle—horizontally preferred.
Unfortunately, the clock doesn’t stop when I want to hit pause. I waste so much time watching 60 second videos on how to make radish butter terrine and 30 second street interviews; stalking knickknacks and outfits that popped up from a sponsored ad; swiping through Instagram carousels on why something the government did will destroy the state of our nation and ignoring the slide that insinuates “if you don’t repost this, you hate [marginalized community here].”
Sometimes, I tap through the stories of the people I follow without even looking down at my phone. The action feels productive because I think we all feel rudimentarily obligated to interact with the content our friends share (Do not get it wrong, I love my friends and their content is wonderful).
I forgive myself for the two other hours I’ve spent on consuming everything and retaining nothing because of this. Technically, tapping means I’m ‘doing’ something.
In many cases, palliative measures are easier to administer than finding a cure. That is, I don’t think anyone can cure us from social media or the internet completely—and I’m still not entirely sure if we should be.
Temporary digital isolation has been great, in that sense, for four reasons:
My attention span gets to heal.
I stop consuming media just to fill space.
My screen time goes down (to a whopping 1h 27min avg).
I get to pretend that performance and perception do not exist.
AI wrappers, Mark Zuckerberg, and my Apple ecosystem haven’t quite figured out how to replace the ways sunlight and fresh air and physical art and conversations over hotpot with friends make me feel. I’m hoping, to the arguable detriment of technological advancement, that they never do.
I got a library card. I went to see a movie at a theater. I started drawing again and I’ve been taking walks more and I read the news—although not a new habit—with less subconscious inflammation to what should be fact than before.
I tell myself that this means I’m being more intentional with how I interact with the world.
I spent the better part of June developing an essay about love and religion—a 3,000-something word mess about monotheistic belief systems being used as framework (i.e., political ideology, selfishness, capitalism, relationships).
It felt topical, given Pride and recent judicial activity, the Southern Baptist Church’s resolution to overturn “laws and court rulings, including Obergefell v. Hodges, that defy God's design for marriage and family.”
A few people I knew voted at that convention.
But, while I find religiously influenced government regulation of love to be morally backward—particularly in a country that added “under God” to the pledge of allegiance as a WWII domestic motivation tactic to distinguish America from the Soviet Union (It was never about praising Christ himself)—the rhetoric that “facts don’t care about your feelings” rarely ever registers as a argument on either side.
How could it, really, when feelings are what make us the most human.
I feel too deeply and too much to write tractable sociopolitical commentary.
I grew up Southern Baptist in a deeply red area—a missionary in the summer, a Sunday School seat filler on the weekends, a baptized somewhat Christian now.
The people who believe there’s a Biblical calling to dictate who and how someone is able to love are the same people who have loved, supported, invested in my family and me for years. I have no moral ground in claiming they are not good.
I don’t study religion or political science, align with a specific party or identify as queer, though some of the people I love most do. I have not lived those experiences—as a field expert or as an Evangelical Republican or as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community—and it complicates the narrative because I can’t bring myself to treat the Bible as fact in a government context on a personal matter.
Under that argument, sharing an essay that tries to dismantle the beliefs of a church and a hometown that taught me about community and hospitality makes me feel like I am no better than anyone who quips ‘hate the sin but love the sinner.’ God forbid I be more of a hypocrite than I already am.
I am also painfully aware that silence begets silence. This is an activists’ justification and it’s right in the fact that complacency has bred injustice time and time again.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations that “if it is not right, do not do it” and “if it is not true, do not say it.” Nassim Taleb controversially frames the idea in Antifragile: “if you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”
Back in high school, I would structure my debate cases on the meta-ethics Robert Goodin defends in Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, even and especially for resolutions that would have been more easily won on other frameworks.
Utilitarianism was easy to compute because morality through it is weighed fundamentally in what results in the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people. Goodin’s argument of using utilitarian calculus for normative governance was targeted at public officials. It’s what AI uses, generally. It’s quantifiable.
These days, even with the technology, it seems like doing the math is too much of an ask.
But even math is easily manipulated. Numbers can be misunderstood and statistics can be misrepresented and David Spiegelhalter, a professor at Cambridge, has a great interview on this that I read early on in college.
Baseline utilitarianism is less and less something I reach for while twirling ethical dilemmas, but Goodin’s take on paying attention—“we are morally required to consider the interests of all those affected by our actions, whether or not we happen to know them, and whether or not we happen to like them”—has become more and more of a guiding principle. In a practical situation, it’s ridiculously idealistic.
If someone were to ask me what my sincere thought was on humanity, I’d say that I think our capacity to harm is far greater than our capacity to heal.
Of course, capacity doesn’t necessarily equate to activity. But capital makes the world the round. Power lets us believe we’re untouchable. Religion allows us to outsource accountability. Etc etc etc. You can’t help anyone until you help yourself; so be it, if the way you help yourself inadvertently causes harm to others in the process. Conceptually, they should be doing the same.
There’s a quote in Pierce Brown’s Golden Son that explains the paradox: “that’s what Society does—spread the blame so there is no villains, so it’s futile to even begin to find a villain, to find justice. It’s just machinery.”
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if it made a sound and you chose to ignore it, will you remember that it fell the next day? There is no moral ground in claiming that people who do not pay attention to the holistic consequences of their actions are not still good people.
Most days, after work and after play, I sit in the gravity of it all.
The world feels like it’s on fire. Everything seems futile and I hate that I understand how easy it is to keep it that way. When I ask myself what can be done—less I become the irritating brat who complains without action—there’s no reply.
Deep down, I know that I have low intention of becoming known for what I do or think or create and, if that’s the case, then which is worse: writing about something I know my subscriber list already somewhat agrees with (groupthink / ideological validation → limited room for growth) or not writing at all (what’s the point of life if not to impact others or leave behind something that lasts longer than you).
But the world has always been on fire. The world has always been unjust, the world has always been cruel and people are conditioned to adapt to it instead of fix. Those are ontological truths I think about on the subway and in bed. I don’t fault anyone for wanting to disconnect from it all.
But, for better or for worse, the 21st century is centered on the digital. To engage with social media and the internet is to gain access to the joy, grief, struggle, celebration, anger, devastation, pain, and hope that people are willing to share.
I whine a lot about AI companies, Meta, and the harms that their deregulation and predatory business expansions have caused on society. Even so, with less of an excuse than those before us to claim ignorance, I can’t help but think about how lucky we are to be able to experience the world for all that it is in real and record time.
That was the initial pitch of modern tech and social media, to be fair; connection means that we get to go through this life together.
The barista at the coffee shop I’m at won’t let me pay for my drink.1 Her coworker teases that it’s too hot outside for pretty girls to worry about things like that.
‘Pretty’ is not what I’d call myself right now.
I’m sweaty from walking the 1.8 miles to get here and I look like I haven’t slept in days (which is true—2AM bedtimes and 5AM trains to NYC do not pair well with a desire to be the best possible student-intern-teaching assistant-researcher-volunteer-mentor-daughter-sister-friend I can be). I can’t tell if my cheeks are hot because I’m still blushing from the compliment or because I’m just out of shape.
But none of that matters. I dig up all of the money I have on me for their tip jar: a $20 and two deformed dollar bills, some nickels, one dime, a few pennies. I might not know what I can do for the world—the answer is likely nothing substantial—but I’m grateful that my pockets had enough change for those baristas to treat themselves too.
No solid conclusion here because there’s always more to say.
I guess we’re all just hoping hell is kind to us—at least kinder, if it’s able to be—than how the hell we’ve built on Earth has been to those who never asked us to.
In the meantime, because hope can only go so far, I think I’ll go use my phone outside. It doesn’t help anyone for me to throw it out the window.
Author’s Note 1:
June has come and passed. Content and healthy, which is all I can ask for. I hope you’re well. If you read anything else this month, I’d like to recommend a poem: “Let July be July” by Morgan Harper Nichols. It’s a good one.
Author’s Note 2:
Coffeeshop, No Coffee isn’t meant to be social critique. It doesn’t ask for anyone to change their actions and it doesn’t aim to influence a certain mindset.
The core subject of my writing on here is me. Top subscriber is me because the key demographic is me and target audience is me, presently as I write to make sense of it all and in the future when I’m reminiscing on what I was thinking months before. Anyone reading can note that this Substack is a rottenly narcissistic blog. It’s public-ish simply because that’s the only way I feel accountable enough to write anything.
This essay is a lot more external than I thought it would be. No expectation for you to agree or disagree. It’s just here in your inbox (or I guess on the internet if you read on the web browser like I beg you often to do) because I wanted to write it. Who knows if I’ll agree with what’s in it come the next time I bother you.
Author’s Note 3:
I told myself I’d reactivate Instagram by the end of June, but I’ve really liked not having it. Here are some things I’ve consumed while off Meta specifically, sorry in advance because it’s definitely more business-leaning than usual:
“Day Away” - Frank Ocean (I know unreleased music should stay untouched—respect the artist and their decision to share their art, etc. I’ll pray for forgiveness later. This is a moral line I am willing to cross: “Hotel Lobby” - Party Next Door; “Pyrite” - Frank Ocean; “My Way” - Ariana Grande)
When McKinsey Comes to Town - Michael Forsythe and Walt Bogdanich (I coffee-chatted a senior for a club my freshman year who told me this book was propaganda. I think consulting raises the toast of “you have to help yourself before you can help others” best—it’s the ideal career launchpad. Those I know in consulting say they’re leaving in two years; doing it for the money; getting staffed on projects they know will fix the world. Any idea can fix the world, honestly, if you format it on a slide deck. Of all tasks, this is something AI can do.)
More cases topical to above that I wouldn’t have known otherwise if I didn’t make being a business ethics snob my personality four years ago (digress—firms have done good too. Harm just hurts more than good heals in my eyes):
BCG recently modeling a plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza. Regardless of what you support (war is bad, there is no gray in that statement), the project seemed to lack multilateral buy-in as it grew larger. BCG’s press release claims the extent it reached to was unauthorized. The consultants working on it were fired. Noting it because of Stephen Foley’s answer to what the firm will learn from the issue: like any company that experiences reputational crisis, BCG will probably just invest more in improving risk process.
How Deloitte charged California $110MM to modernize its unemployment system back in 2010, just for its consultants to build a website by copy-pasting code from a 2008 project on a billable $1,000/hour. When the system and similar counterparts in states like Florida, Ohio, and New York crashed, Deloitte blamed the issues on oversight and having a lack of trained employees on the matter. During the pandemic when people died—from coronavirus, related causes to unemployment and financial stress, and suicide—the firm’s solution was to add a mental health chatbot to EDD.
The McKinsey opioid crisis exacerbation is probably the most common argument against the ethics of the career (this is covered in the book). I see that and raise you the 2017 case of when ICE hired McKinsey to identify detention savings opportunities in wake of the Trump Administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. The recs made by the firm were so drastic and inhumane that they made career ICE workers and eventual whistleblowers uncomfortable: accelerated deportation processes, spending less on food, reducing medical care, lowering supervision and security standards. The firm did call the claims false, ending its work with ICE after disclosures on its $20MM deal reached the public, and said they only advise on operations and not policy. ProPublica responded otherwise.
The Need for Roots - Simone Weil (A librarian recommended this one to me. He said it’s good for anyone searching for the moral weight of belonging. How’d he know.)
“be your own algorithm” - pagemelt (Oh.. have been simmering in my thoughts on tech bro exceptionalism these past few months.)
Materialists (This was the movie I watched at the movie theater. Maybe a bit heavy on financial terminology—which makes sense since the target audience seems to be single-for-some-reason Ivy League grads / metropolitans—but ‘people are people are people and they come as they are.’ That reminder was nice.)
“The Future of Human Agency” - Pew Research Center (Came across this during the peak of my anti-AI tantrum. You don’t have to read but, if you find the time, would recommend the closing thoughts—starting page 153.)
More on going offline, using your phone less, the consequences/benefits (“From Friendship to Performance: Why Social Media is Changing How We Connect” | “let your phone die in your hands” | “The Elegance of Digital Disappearance” | “Smartphone Addiction, Daily Interruptions, and Self-reported Productivity”)
Obviously, this section was written at 2:28PM on a Saturday and not the concerning time this article delivers to your inbox.
Hey! I saw your post on my homepage and wanted to drop by and send you some good vibes. Whenever you have a moment, I’d be grateful if you could do the same. I’m always happy to support and lift each other up!
Lovely start to my morning!!