This is something I say to my family ALL the time. We don’t need to know the answer right now. Creating a question that will require an answer, thereby legitimising to taking your phone out during a meal is also not ok.
Agreed! We need to find the intellectual grounds for stopping benign phone use. Why not look it up, it’s knowledge after all, you always said learning was a good thing?
We have had no phones at the table for a long time in our house, and generally speaking it holds. It’s valuable I’m sure. But equally I suspect not quite sufficient by itself to counterbalance our rampant tech use at other times.
I've greatly struggled with navigating *what* information I need *when*. When smartphones first arrived, I thought my life would dramatically improved with how easy it would be to access information. LLMs have been a step further in that direction. And frankly, it is nice being able to find out more easily when a store opens as I plan a trip or some issues to navigate (as you pointed out on your trip).
But I feel like the lack of friction with these tools has caused me to drown in a sea of information, that terror of quantity. I do not feel any wiser or more knowledgeable - about myself or the world I inhabit - in my two decades on the web, perhaps because I am stuck in "The Shallows" as Nicholas Carr called it. Maybe it's because I do not feel committed to any of these tidbits of information that I don't feel like they are adding color to my life, even if some of them are "useful" or make things more "efficient."
How do we navigate this as individuals and as society? I certainly don't know the answer to the latter, but I've appreciated your posts on the former as it's helped ground me and give voice to some of my own internal thoughts on our approach to technology. Great post, as always.
Thank you so much for reading! And you have put your finger on the problem.
I think we are used to judging our tech usage on the merits. This is “good” use, that’s “bad” use. Phone use gets inaccurately caricatured as scrolling (I’m guilty of using that as a shorthand).
The dilemma the phone gives us is more interesting than that. There’s a tonne of useful and brilliant stuff there. I wrote a piece a little while back about podcasts - who could argue with listening to Great Expectations while walking the dog? I mean that’s amazing.
But in this way all the silence goes, and I’m pretty sure this is bad for us. So ultiamtely I’ve come to believe in ringfenced time - doesn’t matter how good the usage is, just no. The mind needs to breathe.
First, you are a great writer! You are able to create an atmosphere, it felt like we were with you on that day in the Lake District. Second, you are right - again!! I check AI for basically every thing: should I take an umbrella, will the train be late, ... It increases anxiety and as you wrote, it makes you feel like you are in control, when in fact you never are. I still worry about AI in general though lol. But the quantity is the first issue to adress, you are right. By the way, I love the Lake District!! I really want to go there soon!
Thank you! That's such a kind comment, and so appreciated!
And yes… I think people are missing a trick on the quantity question. It's not really about how good the advice is (I read sooooo many pieces about that), it's what happens to your head when you can always always always ask someone something.
Back when I was more stressed about work, my wife telling me she was sick of hearing about it was probably the most helpful thing anyone did for me!
I love the article and the comments that have been left. Reading over them all makes me understand the need for balance. Discrimination between the want and the need. There is absolutely a positive quality in having access to information that adds convenience to the day (if a store is open, etc.) as I read I didn’t know who the hell Theo Walcott is…didn’t google it. Wondered about the bears…didn’t google it. There are things I do google. Of course I have found AI to be right and to be wrong on things, but not every bit of knowledge is really that useful in my mind. I don’t have an insane desire to know everything.
I keep my phone away from me for hours of the day. Drive places navigating on my own without checking the amount of minutes it will take to arrive at a destination. It also scares me that my children will never “know” the way somewhere because they will just type in a destination and follow along mindlessly.
Two small anecdotes on that to finish. Both involving traffic jams and AI…In the first we were coming over a pass and traffic was at a standstill from a grass fire on the pass. Husband googled a new route. Lots of others did too, and we were off the main freeway and down a rural side road in no time…only to find that the road they sent us to did not exist past the point where it was needed, and everyone had to turn back. This created a huge bottleneck or traffic, horrible behavior from our car and MANY others who where also upset by the setback, and we ultimately lost well over an hour before getting back to where we started from.
The other, last week. Traffic was stalled due to road construction. Husband googled an alternative route…everyone in the car remembered the previous experience. We got around and ahead of the traffic flawlessly and AI had saved the day. Or at least 30 minutes of it.
So…that leads me to….basically nothing of worth. Bizarre. So much more could be said. I’ll stop. Thanks Will. I won’t be googling the bears until they show up in my yard.
Good luck with resisting knowing who Theo Walcott is!
The driving navigation point is excellent. It seems likely that whatever skills you outsource you will lose. I think navigation is looong gone for me - whether I regret that I’m not sure. Will think on.
Your two navigation stories capture the problem perfectly, and that’s always been my experience - sometimes totally useless, sometimes totally amazing and you never know which! These things are sent to taunt us :-)
I remember hearing or reading about how people remember/know less than they used to, but are more confident in what they think they know, because of the wanton use of google/AI searches and having answers at our finger tips at all times. I miss the days of disagreeing over who was in a movie or when a song was released for more than 3 seconds.
I find the confidence thing fascinating - yes it’s borne of having read and googled. But I do wonder whether there is some sort of mental change brought on by the phone that makes us more confident/arrogant. I remember reading that it’s a very left hemisphere trait.
I remember one of the best jokes in Shaun Of The Dead was about whether dogs can look up. Now you’d just google it.
Love this. I was recently at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and I couldn't believe everyone using their phone to take photos of the artworks. They would just walk by and take a pic and move on. I wondered about what the artists would think about this kind of interaction. Maybe it helps amplify their works etc. I don't know, but it was new to me and no one cared. I asked AI and it said that is normal now. The museums etc. like the interactivity, helps to promote them to. But is anyone really noticing the nuances of the actual art? The mystery and wonder of the mind and hands that created it? What it's trying to say? What it evokes in us? does every interaction with anything need to be digitally interfaced? Hmmm.
I’d love to condemn their behaviour. But last year we went to an art gallery with the kids. Truth be told, we knew very little about the paintings. We really needed an audio guide. And then one of us had an idea of asking AI what to talk about with kids their age, and honestly it brought the whole trip to life. I have to say honestly it really improved it.
Yet maybe if we were adults I like to think we wouldn’t have done it. Looking at art is something that becomes less possible when our brain is going like the clappers.
I have visited an art gallery without the kids since mine slowed down a touch. And for the first time in my life I found I could look at a painting for a minute a bit more easily (I wrote a piece a couple back, The Boredom Line, and snuck this in for that reason). This is definitely the way I want to be without the kids, and I know if I’d have been Googling every aspect of the painting, my mind would have sped up and I’d have been looking at all the paintings with restless impatience.
I hadn’t thought of the unease of not knowing but totally feel what you describe. I think sometimes knowing something for definite also stops our imagination and interesting conversations from happening as you describe here
That’s a fascinating effect, and I hadn’t clocked that. There is a missed conversation which could have been lovely, reasoning through whether nuclear bears could happen. That feels like a better way to spend one’s time than just looking it up and saying “oh”.
The unease thing… Some time back I first learnt about dukkha, that idea of every moment being unsatisfactory. On longer meditations it really began to feel apparent. And then once seen, I felt I could see it in my normal waking life more readily. And then particularly when reaching for the phone. To check nuclear bears.
Thank you - actually laughed out loud at that one!
I'm very curious to see what ChatGPT says actually! Having read around a little bit on dukkha it's obviously open to interpretation. Some have translated it as suffering, which can sometimes end up in a bland "all life is crap and disappointing" message. But I think it's worth preferring the more interesting translation of "unsatisfactoriness". And that if you meditate a while, you can start to see (or start to believe) that yes, every moment is inherently unsatisfactory. If you ask yourself "is this satisfactory" in every moment, even the very quietest, it's pretty clear that no it is not. It's a discernable and locatable permanent feeling.
And I wonder whether all of this finds its end in the phone. It is a way of seeing why checking and fixing will always be irresistible. Unless the inherent unresolvable unsatisfactoriness is just accepted.
Funnily, I actually resisted the urge to look it up and just pondered about it. I sort of starting to think of it through an experience I always have when doing body scan types of relaxations or yoga - when focusing on how my body feels, I’ll always find a niggle. But then you just accept and get on with the practice anyway. So you don’t just wait for it to one day miraculously feel perfect. Love your explanation and it’s probably miles better than chat gpt ever could have provided
I’d always felt - and must write about someday - that the association of relaxation with meditation is a little unfortunate because it creates an expectation that it would be immediately relaxing when it plainly isn’t.
But yes you’re right, even in body scans, which is about the closest the meditation world gets to relaxation, it’s still there for me. The omnipresent “not good enough”. And as you say, adopting the belief it will never fully go away is in a very meaningful way extremely helpful.
And that is an excellent point. Truth be told, when we did look up the nuclear bears it brought up a photo that looked highly suspicious. So then yes, we never really knew.
I tend to believe that scratching the certainty itch just makes you feel more uncertain. But yes, asking AI compounds that, because its whole thing is "AI can make mistakes." What a world.
This is something I say to my family ALL the time. We don’t need to know the answer right now. Creating a question that will require an answer, thereby legitimising to taking your phone out during a meal is also not ok.
Agreed! We need to find the intellectual grounds for stopping benign phone use. Why not look it up, it’s knowledge after all, you always said learning was a good thing?
We have had no phones at the table for a long time in our house, and generally speaking it holds. It’s valuable I’m sure. But equally I suspect not quite sufficient by itself to counterbalance our rampant tech use at other times.
I've greatly struggled with navigating *what* information I need *when*. When smartphones first arrived, I thought my life would dramatically improved with how easy it would be to access information. LLMs have been a step further in that direction. And frankly, it is nice being able to find out more easily when a store opens as I plan a trip or some issues to navigate (as you pointed out on your trip).
But I feel like the lack of friction with these tools has caused me to drown in a sea of information, that terror of quantity. I do not feel any wiser or more knowledgeable - about myself or the world I inhabit - in my two decades on the web, perhaps because I am stuck in "The Shallows" as Nicholas Carr called it. Maybe it's because I do not feel committed to any of these tidbits of information that I don't feel like they are adding color to my life, even if some of them are "useful" or make things more "efficient."
How do we navigate this as individuals and as society? I certainly don't know the answer to the latter, but I've appreciated your posts on the former as it's helped ground me and give voice to some of my own internal thoughts on our approach to technology. Great post, as always.
Thank you so much for reading! And you have put your finger on the problem.
I think we are used to judging our tech usage on the merits. This is “good” use, that’s “bad” use. Phone use gets inaccurately caricatured as scrolling (I’m guilty of using that as a shorthand).
The dilemma the phone gives us is more interesting than that. There’s a tonne of useful and brilliant stuff there. I wrote a piece a little while back about podcasts - who could argue with listening to Great Expectations while walking the dog? I mean that’s amazing.
But in this way all the silence goes, and I’m pretty sure this is bad for us. So ultiamtely I’ve come to believe in ringfenced time - doesn’t matter how good the usage is, just no. The mind needs to breathe.
First, you are a great writer! You are able to create an atmosphere, it felt like we were with you on that day in the Lake District. Second, you are right - again!! I check AI for basically every thing: should I take an umbrella, will the train be late, ... It increases anxiety and as you wrote, it makes you feel like you are in control, when in fact you never are. I still worry about AI in general though lol. But the quantity is the first issue to adress, you are right. By the way, I love the Lake District!! I really want to go there soon!
Thank you! That's such a kind comment, and so appreciated!
And yes… I think people are missing a trick on the quantity question. It's not really about how good the advice is (I read sooooo many pieces about that), it's what happens to your head when you can always always always ask someone something.
Back when I was more stressed about work, my wife telling me she was sick of hearing about it was probably the most helpful thing anyone did for me!
I love the article and the comments that have been left. Reading over them all makes me understand the need for balance. Discrimination between the want and the need. There is absolutely a positive quality in having access to information that adds convenience to the day (if a store is open, etc.) as I read I didn’t know who the hell Theo Walcott is…didn’t google it. Wondered about the bears…didn’t google it. There are things I do google. Of course I have found AI to be right and to be wrong on things, but not every bit of knowledge is really that useful in my mind. I don’t have an insane desire to know everything.
I keep my phone away from me for hours of the day. Drive places navigating on my own without checking the amount of minutes it will take to arrive at a destination. It also scares me that my children will never “know” the way somewhere because they will just type in a destination and follow along mindlessly.
Two small anecdotes on that to finish. Both involving traffic jams and AI…In the first we were coming over a pass and traffic was at a standstill from a grass fire on the pass. Husband googled a new route. Lots of others did too, and we were off the main freeway and down a rural side road in no time…only to find that the road they sent us to did not exist past the point where it was needed, and everyone had to turn back. This created a huge bottleneck or traffic, horrible behavior from our car and MANY others who where also upset by the setback, and we ultimately lost well over an hour before getting back to where we started from.
The other, last week. Traffic was stalled due to road construction. Husband googled an alternative route…everyone in the car remembered the previous experience. We got around and ahead of the traffic flawlessly and AI had saved the day. Or at least 30 minutes of it.
So…that leads me to….basically nothing of worth. Bizarre. So much more could be said. I’ll stop. Thanks Will. I won’t be googling the bears until they show up in my yard.
Good luck with resisting knowing who Theo Walcott is!
The driving navigation point is excellent. It seems likely that whatever skills you outsource you will lose. I think navigation is looong gone for me - whether I regret that I’m not sure. Will think on.
Your two navigation stories capture the problem perfectly, and that’s always been my experience - sometimes totally useless, sometimes totally amazing and you never know which! These things are sent to taunt us :-)
Nice job setting the bait on Theo. Not biting. Fish not on.
I remember hearing or reading about how people remember/know less than they used to, but are more confident in what they think they know, because of the wanton use of google/AI searches and having answers at our finger tips at all times. I miss the days of disagreeing over who was in a movie or when a song was released for more than 3 seconds.
That’s a really good point.
I find the confidence thing fascinating - yes it’s borne of having read and googled. But I do wonder whether there is some sort of mental change brought on by the phone that makes us more confident/arrogant. I remember reading that it’s a very left hemisphere trait.
I remember one of the best jokes in Shaun Of The Dead was about whether dogs can look up. Now you’d just google it.
Love this. I was recently at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and I couldn't believe everyone using their phone to take photos of the artworks. They would just walk by and take a pic and move on. I wondered about what the artists would think about this kind of interaction. Maybe it helps amplify their works etc. I don't know, but it was new to me and no one cared. I asked AI and it said that is normal now. The museums etc. like the interactivity, helps to promote them to. But is anyone really noticing the nuances of the actual art? The mystery and wonder of the mind and hands that created it? What it's trying to say? What it evokes in us? does every interaction with anything need to be digitally interfaced? Hmmm.
I love that you asked AI about it!
I’d love to condemn their behaviour. But last year we went to an art gallery with the kids. Truth be told, we knew very little about the paintings. We really needed an audio guide. And then one of us had an idea of asking AI what to talk about with kids their age, and honestly it brought the whole trip to life. I have to say honestly it really improved it.
Yet maybe if we were adults I like to think we wouldn’t have done it. Looking at art is something that becomes less possible when our brain is going like the clappers.
I have visited an art gallery without the kids since mine slowed down a touch. And for the first time in my life I found I could look at a painting for a minute a bit more easily (I wrote a piece a couple back, The Boredom Line, and snuck this in for that reason). This is definitely the way I want to be without the kids, and I know if I’d have been Googling every aspect of the painting, my mind would have sped up and I’d have been looking at all the paintings with restless impatience.
I hadn’t thought of the unease of not knowing but totally feel what you describe. I think sometimes knowing something for definite also stops our imagination and interesting conversations from happening as you describe here
That’s a fascinating effect, and I hadn’t clocked that. There is a missed conversation which could have been lovely, reasoning through whether nuclear bears could happen. That feels like a better way to spend one’s time than just looking it up and saying “oh”.
The unease thing… Some time back I first learnt about dukkha, that idea of every moment being unsatisfactory. On longer meditations it really began to feel apparent. And then once seen, I felt I could see it in my normal waking life more readily. And then particularly when reaching for the phone. To check nuclear bears.
That’s a new concept for me, really interesting, will be digging into that a bit more (reaches for chat gpt 😅)
Thank you - actually laughed out loud at that one!
I'm very curious to see what ChatGPT says actually! Having read around a little bit on dukkha it's obviously open to interpretation. Some have translated it as suffering, which can sometimes end up in a bland "all life is crap and disappointing" message. But I think it's worth preferring the more interesting translation of "unsatisfactoriness". And that if you meditate a while, you can start to see (or start to believe) that yes, every moment is inherently unsatisfactory. If you ask yourself "is this satisfactory" in every moment, even the very quietest, it's pretty clear that no it is not. It's a discernable and locatable permanent feeling.
And I wonder whether all of this finds its end in the phone. It is a way of seeing why checking and fixing will always be irresistible. Unless the inherent unresolvable unsatisfactoriness is just accepted.
Funnily, I actually resisted the urge to look it up and just pondered about it. I sort of starting to think of it through an experience I always have when doing body scan types of relaxations or yoga - when focusing on how my body feels, I’ll always find a niggle. But then you just accept and get on with the practice anyway. So you don’t just wait for it to one day miraculously feel perfect. Love your explanation and it’s probably miles better than chat gpt ever could have provided
That's such an interesting point!
I’d always felt - and must write about someday - that the association of relaxation with meditation is a little unfortunate because it creates an expectation that it would be immediately relaxing when it plainly isn’t.
But yes you’re right, even in body scans, which is about the closest the meditation world gets to relaxation, it’s still there for me. The omnipresent “not good enough”. And as you say, adopting the belief it will never fully go away is in a very meaningful way extremely helpful.
And that is an excellent point. Truth be told, when we did look up the nuclear bears it brought up a photo that looked highly suspicious. So then yes, we never really knew.
I tend to believe that scratching the certainty itch just makes you feel more uncertain. But yes, asking AI compounds that, because its whole thing is "AI can make mistakes." What a world.