Tinder© Tramps, InstaThots®, And The Attention Sump In Your Pocket

“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!

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

18 thoughts on “Tinder© Tramps, InstaThots®, And The Attention Sump In Your Pocket”

    1. Same. Refuse to have any apps -even though the sole grocery store chain within 50 miles increasingly uses ‘discount coupons’ (only available with their app) in lieu of actual sales. Refuse to give anyone automatic access to our bank account- but I’ll write a check/make a payment each month when necessary. Refuse to use “zelle” or other means to move digital money; we work around it and give our kids cash/checks – in personal or via mail (yeah, know that’s risky too). Refuse to pick up my phone while driving. If I’m stuck in a waiting room for anything, everyone else is frantically scrolling their phones; I am READING my kindle. I neither need nor want incessant stimulation, and much prefer avoiding all aspects of what passes for modern merkan cultcha.

  2. 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….

    1. Get very few spam calls on my cell – never have – but the ‘jeets have recently discovered our “new” (3.5 years old) landline and lately it’s constant. And yeah, they got some White whores/soiboys to do the “Umm,” “Can you hear me?” and “My name is Joanie/Paul/etc.” Depending on my mood, I just pick up the phone and leave it until they disconnect, or I blow a loud whistle into the receiver, or I comment on how ‘jeets have tiny brown dicks and they smell. That often gets them to break cover and reply “fock you.” I’m sure the day will come when I’m charged/convicted of racial hatred on spam calls, but c’est la vie.

  4. 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.

  5. Kept my old NOKIA™ flip phone that served me well from the mid-90s until the early ’00s. It sits on my credenza as an antique reminder when phones didn’t have cameras. Or texting.

    Switched to a Blackberry that worked for 6-7 years. iPhone 4 at first, unlike my MacBook (approx. 6 yrs. of life for each), had to upgrade every 2-3 years or so, as the iOS got upgraded, making it obsolete. Wondering when my 15 Pro (paid off) will become defunct so Verizon can fleece me another $1.5K+.

    Spam calls? Switched my old cell # to Google Voice 5 years ago. It gets 80% of spam, but the new # still gets 4-5/day, despite reporting spam & blocking. Otto Dial is a busy guy.

  7. Heck, I still use a flip phone. It gets better reception and I can text with it almost as quickly as a smart phone (I can’t really hold and use a smart phone well with my big hands and fat fingers). It just can’t do group texts or allow me to do some electronic tickets for sports venues.

    I have a smart phone but don’t use it except as a camera and to run a few apps for a go-to telescope mount. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole as I’ve seen the damage it does to both intelligence and attention span for too many people.

  8. The selfie influencer sexapp pocket panopticon culture is upset about “flock cameras”. The demons crack themselves up.

    If not for social media still requiring whoring your kids out by staging the second life in reelz and shorts the babies would just be left in their Amazon cribs wearing the back of their heads flat like the Soviet bloc babies of the Baltics.

    Those flathead tracksuit men are now easy to spot, like the precious bubble girls with their thousand yard glow ring stares flocking every public place in amerika.

    I mostly leave my device at home when leaving the farm to town. The contrast of the device drones is even more stark when I’m without my pocket moloch. Its extra nice to not get the contagious mind herpes from watching them and then start fumbling with my phone out of some odd compulsion that is now totally ” normal”.

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