Phones – a College Epidemic
Musings #2 | ...so I leave mine at home.
Throughout my 6 years of boarding school in Nigeria, I was not allowed a phone on campus.
Walks were dates, done with lovers, well-wishers, or – if you were fortunate – both.
Dinners were eaten with friends, acquaintances, or assigned table-mates.
Nights were spent floating words, ideas, and dreams through the crispy-cold air in our rectangular dormitories.
Waking up – at 5.30am or whatever godly time you needed to – was coordinated by other humans you trusted. You’d beg the most conscientious person you knew to rise earlier, have your waking up be the first item on their mind, gather footwear, and journey the chilling, harmattan breeze to yours. Sometimes twice in the same night.
Written notes were primary means of non-contact communication. We wrote our hearts out on flimsy pieces of paper, folded across the sticky margins – mimicking the feeling of sealing an envelop – and leveraged the untaught, self-sustaining note-distribution-scheme ran by the youngest and (again) trusted.
Novels were wielded like contraband – snuck between hands, stolen, and graced by over a hundred unique pairs of eyes in a single term – before ultimately being confiscated by the overindulgent teacher.
We were guided by the collective. When it was time to eat, we filed out and streaked the tarred roads to the dining hall. Not doing so would render you perceivable. When it was time to commune at the chapel, we skipped across and funneled ourselves through the pews. Not doing so would, again, render you truant.
Potentiation was maximized. The boring stuff became automated and, in those hoard-like moments, we found time to forge real connections, muse about existence and look up. Yes, we got to look up.
I didn’t think I would miss this privilege to look up – to see others look up, to walk, to talk, to receive a non-Midwestern-Smile** – until I started college in the United States.
** the reflexive I-don’t-know-you-but-I-see-you-passing-smile American strangers offer, which is an anomaly back home.
Phones in college
In college, students are patients and the phone our servitor.
We have deferred all our trust to it. It walks us, dines with us, entertains us, wakes us up, sends notes on our behalf, spares us from exchanging artifacts, and is – itself – invincible to even the most uptight professor.
We have given up agency to the clouds and become feeble – and unable to wash ourselves without it singing in the background.
It has become the essential worker – needing to be shielded and to shield others from our demise. Our head stooped. Mind numbed. Eyes averted. Face concealed. The world is now safe from us.
This a college epidemic with phones, but we’re the ones who need saving:
Eating: is undertaken with phones centered or elevated, our elbows in genuflecting, food on the side, head down. Not with friends or the perchance neighbor at the dining. We sit solo at a four-sided tables, fling our bags on one chair, and by our stoop – seal up the remaining two. Sick person eating – stay away.
Walking: is done with phones cuffed and centered at our chests. Students lull the routes between classes on auto-pilot – only looking up to prop the door open, when it’s time to step on the cross-walk, or when an oncoming cycler signals their presence. Should there be a hoard of walkers on the same path, these cues become ineffective triggers.
Driving: is now routinely performed with phones adjacent to the wheel, centered and within our gaze. Whereas a manual-transmission required simultaneous use of both hands to operate, today’s cars have afforded another opening for the phone. I can’t count how many near-hits – then dreary smile – I’ve suffered from patients glued to their phones at stop signs and pedestrian crossings.
Here’s a list of the ridiculous things I’ve experienced while driving or being driven by patients:
Video calls – handheld
YouTube: my Uber driver in Atlanta earlier this year streamed Modern Family throughout the drive to the airport. Another propped screen held the directions. A third, the Tesla screen, displayed the status of the car’s autopilot.
Snapchat: one acquaintance holds their phone against the nape of the steering wheel. Centered. Snaps opened. Snap taken. Snaps mass-replied. Without emotion.
Waiting: for class is seen out with phones guarding any discussion.
Small-talk: a new indicator you are small-talking is one’s presence complicate reeling out a phone to attend to a notification.
Classes: are done with phones. This is where we get the most range:
phone behind laptop,
phone on the lap,
phone held high,
phone hung around neck,
(head)phone in one ear,
(head)phone in both ears.
Nostalgia – and moving on.
College has gifted me a scent of nostalgia about what was, the rot that is becoming, and the opportunity to learn.
For the past three years, I written tirelessly yet unsuccessfully about nostalgia – and for a few related reasons.
The first is loss: nostalgia seems to only manifest at the first perceived possibility of what could no longer be. I have endured many losses. And I will suffer many more. This coming-of-age acceptance has seemingly fastened my intuition for endings, which has in turn caused frequent onsets of nostalgia.
Why do I feeling nostalgic about something that isn’t over (yet)? Because everything ends.
The second is redemption: nostalgia offers us solutions to once unsolvable timelines. In fact, I’d argue that you cannot feel nostalgic about a moment you had completely resolved. The feeling only festers in our obliviousness of what is. It lets us consume (or be consumed by) today, anticipates personal growth or chaos, then springs once we can begin to make sense of what was. We gain understanding of the past in exchange for time – and often pain. And we are gifted the chance to re-parametrize the simulation.
The other reasons deserve their own essays, so I’ll return to the matter at hand –
Nostalgia for a quiet and dampened place – one without patients on life-support.
Nostalgia for difficult and deliberate access.
Nostalgia for algorithm-less connections – forged through stalk and craft.
Nostalgia for going slow.
But we press on,
Biking through seas of heads bent low,
Avoiding the collisions, inevitable.
The phones will not stop. The silence may never return.
Yet, there are still priors hidden beneath the noise.
If only we could look up long enough to find them.
Written with angst,
Published in resignation,
Joel
Bro this is a beautiful piece. Thank you for reminding me of the gift of nostalgia
My God this is so good. I love how it reads like poetry; and the fact that poetry is often Melancholic adds to the nostalgia you want readers to experience. Love this one so much.