“I’m bored! I’m bored and I’m getting eaten by mosquitos. I’m being eaten. And I’m bored as well.” – The Grand Tour
I got a free iPhone© and a free iPad® today! Pistols are magic!
I had my previous cell phone for nine years: from August of 2017 to August of 2026. That’s a good run. I bought a fairly nice one back in the day, and took good care of it.
I lie. Somehow the screen cracked in November, 2020, so I had to make sure it stayed dry. The old phone did its duty. I would still be using it, but it’s full, and there are a number of faults going on that make me think that it is time.
On the advice of Pugsley, I swapped over from the Mao People’s Phone© (Android™) to the Fascist Fisher-Price™ phone (Apple©). I know, it sounds nuts.
What a difference 10 years has made in technology! Steve Jobs once said that he wanted the iPhone© to feel so sexy that people would be tempted to lick it. This 17th version is a tightly integrated piece of technology. I mean, I haven’t licked it, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not WiFi-curious as to what licking it would feel like.
I used to live on Mars®, but decided that was way too much chocolate.
Civilization has been on a downward slide since, oh, whenever they started welfare and started encouraging poor stupid people to make more poor stupid people by paying them to be poor and stupid. Incentives matter. Welfare was bad, but the iPhone© really took societal collapse from “Hiroshima” to “full Tsar Bomba”. Never go full Tsar Bomba.
The iPhone© is the problem. It allowed interaction on a scale never before seen, and was the platform that empowered Tinder© tramps to seek out Chad to be used for a night and InstaThots® to feed their narcissism. That was bad enough, but it also became the attention sump, turning every waking moment into a distraction.
Distraction and dopamine hits are what the iPhone® was built to deliver. I’ve only had mine a week, but a friend indicates that it is also an amazing device for having Apple® to sink their fangs into my credit card and suck as hard as I’ll let them. They monetize everything.
Like?
Location. How fast I drive. The number of steps I take in a day (not enough) and how steady my gait is (very).
Someone stole all the fruit from my farm in Georgia, that leaves me peachless.
The last two are maybe going to be a net benefit for me, as I can certainly see myself always wanting to be above average, so soon enough I’ll be walking 100,000 steps a day. Well, me and Jason Arday.
Too soon?
The phone is designed to distract, designed to turn every bit of life into a consumption event. With a dizzying array of apps pre-built in, it’s almost intoxicating flipping through the pages of things I could be doing right this second instead of . . . wait, why did I pick the phone up in the first place? Oh, yeah, got distracted. Oh, a notification! The Mrs. let the dogs out!
How does Jeff Foxworthy kill werewolves? With a silver mullet.
The first time I went to Las Vegas the sounds and sights were overwhelming after a few hours. I think that’s the point, but that was also in a world mainly free of the Internet back in 1997.
It may seem like a super-power, but it is a pretty useless superpower, like having the ability to retract my fingernails or hair back into my body.
What is nice, though, is that it tracks and graphs which apps I’m using and when I’m using them, and the option to tell the phone to remind me, “Wilder, time to shut this damn thing down and go to bed”.
That has actually been a positive for me. I shut down the distraction device, pick up a book, and read. I’d already gotten through a novel or non-fiction book every other week since the start of the year (last two: C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World, current: Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char), but the other alternative is to be bored.
I read a biography of JFK. The end was mind blowing.
I avoid brooding and regret since they are a horrible ways to program yourself to think, and a trap that should be avoided.
Besides, boredom is useful.
Boredom is that innate spark in humans, that makes us feel uncomfortable in sitting in a warm, dark room, well fed, with low effort. Boredom pushes us to create, to learn, to invent. The first person to figure out a bow-drill or decided that stacking rocks in a pyramid shape might be cool or that being the first guy to make it to the South Pole was a good thing.
Boredom is also why some animals die or refuse to mate in captivity. Our full-on stimulation world might be part of the reason that mating seems to be no longer as important to many of the young in 2026.
HR was upset with my urine sample. Apparently they only want them when they request them.
People aren’t meant to be continually distracted. We are supposed to be bored sometimes because for at least tens of thousands of years that was our default programming. Boredom forces us to change.
A society based on waiting for someone else to distract us is madness. Like licking an iPhone©.
Yay! More microplastics in my testicles! That’s nuts!
I hate doing anything on my phone other than making phone calls and texting, and I don’t really even like doing that.
My spam-to-actual-calls ratio on my phone is ridiculous and getting worse. These spam calls are getting ever more tricky. The feminine robo-voice says “Umm…” and a pause before saying “Hi, my name is” with a different name every time. To me, spam calls are the worst distraction the phone provides. All the other distractions…well… they can be pretty sweet….
DISCLOSURE AGENDA PAUL BOCK
My old cell phone is reminding me storage is almost full. So, I need to download the photos of all my vacations, the family, different memes of importance, and wise words I like to reflect on. Of course, I won’t be able to pull them up, show them to uninterested strangers, and my phone will only be for communications. I’ll take a selfie every now and then, and wonder who the old man is in the photos.