Smart Phone Compulsion and People Used To Spit On My Dad When He Was Little
BE BRAVE FRIDAY AND LIVING HAPPY EXTRA
This post is a two-for and I apologize.
The first part is just a tiny little LIVING HAPPY extra for Saturday. The second part is my Be Brave Friday post that I shared on Facebook, Medium, and my website, but it felt more like it belonged here on LIVING HAPPY than on those other places.
I hope you don’t mind.
SMART PHONE COMPULSIONS
I have a friend who is known for checking their phone constantly. They flip it over at dinner; they’re on it in the bathroom; they do this during movies and concerts and parties; they have it when they are doing the horizontal mambo (or so I’ve heard).
And when I ask them why (and a lot of people have asked them why), they’ll say, “I’m afraid of missing something from a client.” Or they’ll say that they’re working.
I used to be a bit like this too when my daughter wasn’t with me. My mommy anxiety made me constantly worried that I was going to miss an important text, that I’d take five minutes more to pick her up from some emergency. What if she was surrounded by zombie hamsters and I wasn’t aware of it? What if she needed me?
Full disclosure: My daughter is at her best during real emergencies. She doesn’t need me at all. Also, she has a dad! And friends’ parents!
Anyway, after one too many times with friends telling me to put away my phone, I finally admitted what was going on. I was compelled to check it. I was afraid to not check it.
There’s a post from all the way back in 2016 by Kyla Cathey on Psych Central called “Smart Phone OCD.” I wasn’t cool with that headline for a bunch of reasons, but the article is really fascinating.
She wrote:
I did a little poking around (OK, I admit it, I just wanted to make sure I don’t have smartphone OCD). The one “symptom”that stood out is one those of us with non-smartphone OCD will recognize — dependence on a smartphone or tablet becomes OCD when it begins disrupting daily life and causing abnormal levels of panic or anxiety.
From a few different sources, including the original article, I found a few other signs someone may have an unhealthy dependence on a smartphone or tablet:
You feel the need to drop everything and check your phone every couple of minutes, or every time you hear a notification alert. (In 2013, an app found that the average person checks their phone 110 times per day, or up to 10 times per hour. That’s bad enough, but the truly addicted checked up to 900 times per day.)
Your time with your family or friends is affected negatively. Friends or family members may even complain about your smartphone or tablet use.
Your productivity at work is damaged because you regularly stop to check your phone.
Your sleep is disturbed because you regularly wake up to check your phone.
You imagine your phone buzzing even when it isn’t — this even has a name, “phantom vibration syndrome.”
Turning your phone off causes intense anxiety or even panic.
The problem has become so widespread that German officials moved to keep employers from contacting their employees outside of working hours, allowing workers to put their phones away without fear of missing a vital email or text about their jobs.
You might not be this extreme, right? And yay!
But it’s still pretty important to think about.
Every time you interrupt something else to check your phone? You’re unproductive.
Every time you interrupt a conversation to glance at your phone? You risk pushing someone away because they think you aren’t listening or in the moment with them.
The phone is amazing; it does so much for us, right? But, it also can hinder us and our relationships and our concentration.
BE BRAVE FRIDAY POST
There’s this old Simon Sinek quote that goes, “A star wants to see herself rise to the top. A leader wants to see those around her become stars.”
I like this quote a lot, but I think that there doesn’t have to be a dichotomy. I think we can all rise together; we can all make ourselves better; make our communities better.
That’s a choice that we make, every single day, a choice to make our selves or our communities better.
My dad was basically ancient. He was born in late October 1929, the youngest child of three. His mom’s grandmother was Jewish, but he didn’t even know if his mother knew that. His dad was about as protestant as a man can be before a man turns into an atheist. Before he became an atheist, he was a stock broker. He was a stock broker in October 1929, working in a ground floor office in Manhattan. One day something thudded. Screams echoed down the street.
One day he looked out his window and saw that another stock broker, a man he knew, a man that he was friends with, had jumped out of a window to his death. Another man followed him down to his death, jumping on purpose because life had become too much. It had no hope for them anymore.
When the U.S. stock market crashed in October, 1929, it wasn’t just numbers that crashed; it was people too.
It was a time of death, and fear. It was a time that began a ten-year depression that crashed even more American families. That was when my dad was born. He was born not into an atmosphere of joy and the American Dream and prosperity, but into a time of fear.
My grandmother was a tiny woman – maybe 4 feet 10 inches tall. Her favorite thing in the world? A beautiful ripe tomato. Her other favorite thing? Butchering her own meat. She was a poet who never submitted a poem. She was an artist who never showed a painting. She was a mother who brought three children into the world and the last of those was my dad. But most of her favorite things had to do with food.
She could weep over the perfection of a tomato.
She could do a happy dance over a good cut of meat.
She knew how hard it was to survive after you were used to surviving. She knew how hard it was to eat when there was no food.
So, my dad grew up a pessimist. The first ten years of his life were grim. He expected bad things to happen. He expected the government to fail you, for life to be scraping and angry and tough. His father went from stockbroker to idealogue. Disheartened by a system that could allow such things to happen, he made my father stand on street corners, passing out political leaflets that my grandfather wrote, but that my father was too young to read or understand. Those leaflets talked about people working together for the common good, about people taking care of one another, about the role of government. Some people would take the leaflets and throw them at my dad’s sweet three-year-old and then nine-year-old face, screaming at him that he was a socialist or an idiot or worse. Some took pity on him and just pretended he didn’t exist. Some spat. Some pushed him in a puddle. But my dad would get up again. He’d wipe his face. He’d stand there.
My grandfather ran for state senate and U.S. Representative for New York. He always lost. By a lot.
My dad ran for nothing, but he always lost, too.
My grandmother watched them struggle and dreamt of food to feed her family. My grandfather dreamt of changing the world. My dad probably dreamt about sweets and girls or something like that. He hadn’t told me. It would be kind of embarrassing, since I’m his daughter, but when his life was ending, he was still an 84-year-old player, so I’m guessing it’s likely.
This story of my dad’s has no pretty end. The economy got better. My grandmother was able to buy meat and grow tomatoes and cry. My dad grew up to be a truck driver who always felt stupid even though he was smart, into a man who always was grateful when people were kind to him instead of mean, a man who always longed for sweetness—sweetness in his food and in his people.
The true stories don’t always have pretty ends, I don’t think. They are hard to make sense of. How do you explain to your wife about a friend who was joyous a mere six months before, and then plummeting to his death in front of you? How do you explain to your infant son that the world is full of cycles of joy and pain and want and have and some people only get to see one part of the cycle? How do you make sense of people being cruel to a three-year-old boy holding political papers on a street corner in New York City?
You don’t.
Because true stories sometimes can’t be explained easily. Just like the world now, like the news now, like the stories now, true tales have to be picked at, layer by layer. They are the lived-out poems of people, and the truths aren’t always easy to see, but the meanings rest underneath the laid-out facts.
My father was a man who expects the worst and gives his best. His father expected the best and often gave the worst. My dad’s mother found miracles in everything and nothing. And they survived. My father survived to have three children of his own. I am the last and the youngest by a lot, sort of an afterthought. My grandfather fled the country to Mexico and Canada, reading books and getting irate and dying in a bathtub when he was in his 90s. I don’t remember him. My grandmother lived until she was 104, scribbling out poems, admiring tomatoes, rejoicing in protein. And my dad kept living too, until he didn’t, plagued by worries about the country and the world, plagued by people’s apathy or conversely their inability to investigate deeper than reposted Facebook statuses and twisted truths, plagued by a quick moving cancer in the area around his lungs. It was a cancer that volunteer firefighters like him often get.
“What will become of us, Carrie?” he always asked me. “What will become of people?”
And I told him, “We will survive if we want to survive, Dad. We will find tiny moments of hope and truth if we want them. We will make our lives and our friends’ lives into stories that we tell each other again and again.”
And then he would tell me a story about how his dad and uncle (after the Crash) ran a tug boat business in the Hudson River, hauling trash across the water on barges. My grandfather would be on the barge and his brother-in-law would drive the boat. Once, the barge began to sink. Neither of them could swim. All they could do was try to hurry across the open water to get to the shore before it was too late. The whole time, my grandfather expected to drown in the garbage other people didn’t want any more. He clung to the tow rope as his brother-in-law tried to get the tug boat to speed. He survived.
“Can you believe that, Carrie?” my dad would ask me for the 1,000th time. “He survived.”
And I’d think, “Yes. Yes, I can.”
People are still enslaved. Now. People are still killed for no reason. Now. People still starve. Now. People struggle and excel and fall to hate and thrive in love. Now.
So this Be Brave Friday, here is my hope. My hope is that you do things. Go change the world. Change it with your stories. Change it with your money. Change it with your hope. Change it by running for office. Change it by helping others. Change it by just surviving. Change it by being informed. Change it by being brave. Changing it by making yourself and others stars.
And feel free to check out these links, but no pressure: