We Can Reach for Our Phones as Masters or as Slaves

It is only when we have the option to fail that we learn self-discipline

Ulysses and the Sirens. Herbert James Draper, 1909

The Stoics warned us about dependence on material possessions two thousand years ago.

Had they known of what we now carry around in our pocket, what would they have said?

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As I rolled to a stop at a red light, I saw my arm reach for my iPhone out of the corner of my eye. The phone wasn’t even ringing; it was just sitting there. Whenever I find my arm launching itself towards the phone in my cupholder, I experience a kaleidoscopic jolt: a mix of excitement and anticipation, yet tinged with a strong sense of potential loss, a loss that I might, somehow, be able to mitigate by gazing into the screen of my phone. This stream flashes before my minds eyes in a microsecond, and it gives my arm an unnaturally jerky speed to pick the phone up before I can even register that my arm is acting without my approval. Perhaps that’s why it acts with such speed in the first place.

Arm, what are you doing? An ironic question, since if it could speak, it would say, “Following your orders.” The phone and its apps are designed to cause anxiety. Terrorists weaponize fear to get us to change our behavior, while tech bros weaponize anxiety for the same reason. The former does this by threatening our bodies, the latter by usurping our minds.

It seems them that the smart phone is a bipolar terrorist we carry around in our pocket. It can make us laugh when the mood strikes it, or it can teach us things we didn’t know. Its primary purpose, however, is to worm its way deeper into our thought, our subconscious, our most ancient and unarticulated impulses, until we become extensions of it instead of it becoming extensions of us. I actually fixed both my hands on the wheel to better keep an eye on them should they do something unexpected.

Is this then what it is to be “mad” as Epictetus would say?

When I place my phone in my hand, I can turn it around and admire its compact shape, its pleasing contours, and its heaviness. Why shouldn’t I hold it? It’s not like I’m holding a syringe of heroin or a goblet of hemlock. No – it is far worse. Those substances merely rot our bodies while this machine rots our minds. My hand has blood on it when it obeys the voice which rises from the depths of my subconscious, which means that I myself am committing a shade of murder-suicide: the murder of my inner discourse, and the suicide of my governing faculty.

I didn’t like where I found myself at that red light. As the traffic picked up, I consoled myself that at least I wasn’t the young woman to my left driving five miles an hour below the speed limit in the passing lane. Her eyes looked down at her phone eighty percent of the time and up at the road the other twenty percent, and she wore a mildly amused yet disturbingly detached expression on her face. I thought for a moment that her Volkswagen was in fact a hearse, and she its corpse, having opted out of using a casket in favor of a natural burial. But neither was I the old man at peace with the world as he cruised in the slow lane to my right, his ruddy wrinkles a portrait of slow, steady, silent contemplation. No, I found myself occupying the dreaded middle ground; the apex of the bell curve, neither here-right-now nor empty-minded, neither fully alive nor fully dead.

And yet I reached for my phone anyway. What did it get me? Did it place my candidate in the White House? No. Did it liberate Ukraine? No. These things are what the Stoics would call “indifferent” in the sense that they are outside of our control. Try as we may, the final outcome is not up to us.

What then was I was babbling about in the deeps of my subconscious that caused me to reach out for it? News? This too is indifferent. Texts? Indifferent. Reputation? Indifferent. Why is reputation, for instance, indifferent? If our reputation were under our control, then it would mean we can control what others think. If we could control what others think, then why would our brothers have nailed good men to crosses, burned them at the stake, made them drink hemlock, or blindfolded them before firing squads? It would seem then that we cannot govern the minds of others and thus their appraisal of us. All we have been given is the governance of our own minds, actions, and desires.

Did I then gain some moment of serenity – some useful act within my control – when I found myself thumbing my passcode into my phone? Did I gain a warm flood of gratitude? Did I overcome some brutal test of will? Did I conduct an uncompromising review of my actions earlier that day? No. I gained nothing but a failure that has given me thinking material to improve in the act of living, and for this I can be grateful. In one hand I found my phone, and in the other I found myself three seconds closer to death with nothing to show for it but a weak mind, a broken chain of thought, and a momentary boost of dopamine that left me, Gollum-like, hunched over my Precious in my truck.

In describing the phone in this way, however, am I giving it more power than it actually has? What then is the nature of my phone? It is neither meaningful interaction, nor joy, nor a bond with a being that breathes. I’m not sitting across a stone ringed fire from another human as wolves or cannibals prowl the mountains around us. I hear the sound of a text, a mere electrical pulse in the ether that doesn’t pump blood or share a love of the black dome of night above me – it can wait. I hear my ringtone, but this too does not enjoy consciousness that will come to an end after a period of time – it can wait.

It becomes clear to me that the phone does not have any power of its own. It is merely yttrium, terbium, lanthanum, and other rare earth elements that have been drilled from a pit somewhere, assembled in a plant, and shipped across the seas. If we bend our minds far enough back in time, long before the yttrium and lanthanum took form, we and the phone were one. We share a common ancestry. Its elements simply travelled a different path from ours since the solar systems whirlwind flung the roiling earth into orbit around the sun. The phone therefore isn’t worth hating because it too is simply indifferent. Since it does not extend my life as Sauron’s Ring would have done, I must choose to spend what time I have remaining in either sanity or madness. 

So the problem is neither the phone nor the portal to the virtual world it opens to us – the problem is reaching for the phone without conscious intent, which brings about the repetitive, habitual annihilation of our solitude, our awareness, and our deep, silent, contemplative thought, all of which make up the soil of serenity. The old man on the highway had it right.

What then lies within our control? I'm not going to mimic Odysseus and tie my hands to the mast when the sirens sing. I want the option to grab this phone so that I can overcome the impulse planted in my mind by those seeking to command my attention, or at the very least learn from the failure of reaching for it.

Rope is worthless. It is only when we can fail that we learn self-discipline.

And if, when I blink, I discover the phone sitting in palm, I will ask, “What would Epictetus have me do?” He would have me test myself to accept whatever comes with calm, whether I see one thousand emails or zero, hear talk of mushroom clouds or elixirs of immortality, thus turning this dead object in my hand into a constant reminder that self-command is all that is truly our own.  

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