- there's almost no relationship in which the presence of the phone has not had a profound effect
- addiction
- monasticism - distraction - wall-off instantly alluring and most meaningless distractions offered by the wider world
- digital sabbath - engage directly with others, be relaxed, immersed in nature and present
- look things up inside yourself - give ideas time and attention - 'In the minds of geniuses we discover our own neglected thoughts' Ralph Waldo Emerson
- our phones and our relationships - malleability provides the perfect excuse for disengagement from the trickier aspects of other people
- dating - everyone is radically imperfect, compatibility is an achievement of love, it can't be its precondition - cannot help with the real challenge of love - extending sympathy and understanding to human frailty
- nature and the sublime - we are forgetting (as we update) what nature - quietly and with great and tender majesty - might really have been trying to say to us
- stimulation vs calm - our most urgent need is for calm - we react to stimuli even when we're exhausted - phones are endless carriers of claims to rouse us when what we really need is exactly the opposite
- shopping - purchasing ambitions are focused only at the lower level of our own pyramid of needs (reference image within article)
- beyond instagram - we need to make ourselves pay attention - our ease of which we can create an image works against our desire to properly notice anything - put down the phone and sketch
- appreciation - phones deliver the world directly to us yet often limit the things we actually pay attention to
- poetry - brevity to vacuity, serious ideas must be transmitted in long and challenging texts - this is an educated delusion - you can conjure the deepest, sweetest and saddest truths in a few words - brief media to say big important thing
- news - modern idea of news is falsely and unflattering - it imagines we need to know everything thats happened in the world - really important news is just everything that is crucial for us to take in order to understand our own world and our place in it
- FOMO - its not the notion of missing out thats the problem, its ideas of what we might be missing out on - phones unhelpfully skew this
- the dream of being liked - we might know plenty of people but others never quite know us as we wish to be known - loneliness is simply a price we have to pay for holding onto a sincere ambitious view of what companionship must and could be
- travel - while our phones can record and reveal to others the half-formed thoughts circulating our mind they cannot as yet bring our submerged reactions to the surface
- play - the unexpected intensity of fooling around with a normally staid and measured acquaintance - as we play, we forget to cheque our phones
- selfies - tempting to think we should take them less seriously - distance ourselves from it and see it in a mocking light - but the wiser move might be to get much more ambitious - self-reflection - not seeking the approval of others but seeking self-knowledge
- communication - technology annihilates physical but not psychological, distance - our words move infinitely faster than a carrier pigeon or a scroll bearing slave but we are as yet no better at explaining ourselves than we were in early history
- death - we use our phones for constant reminders - there are more important appointments to be reminded of - appointments with ourselves, our worries and not the anxieties that they create - brevity sadly is the key to appreciation - it is when we remember death that we understand properly the urgency of the time we have left
- utopia - still so far from technology that will really help us advance - capitalism has delivered on only our simplest of needs - primitive times - in the future our phones will be kind and not merely subservient - they will know how to edge us away from a stupid decision and how to summon up our better natures
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