Coping: Interpretation Josh Ellis

Another Riveting Installment of: Put Your Phone Away

If this post applies to you, you probably don’t want to hear it yet again, but this is an entire post about this habit of yours, your… cell phone use. Specifically, I want to talk about how I think that the moment someone takes out their phone to browse social media and/or zesty memes is when they’ve begun divesting interest from whatever was previously engaging them. Now you might be tempted to invalidate this by saying how arbitrary of an observation it is to make, which isn’t entirely incorrect, but there’s so much more going on when one purposefully diverts their focus from whatever important activities they’re engaged in to take their phone out of their pocket and check their mail (this also goes out to those of you who check mail on your laptop in class, you “I’m too productive to listen and take notes” doofuses).

What I'm talking about, is how going to work, lecture, doing homework and chores require one to get out of their regular daily routine, to turn their mental efforts onto models and knowledge used almost exclusively for these tasks. Seeing as how these tasks draw one away from your preferred environments, pulling out ones phone re-establishes ones link with wherever they last left off. Switching back and forth from these two sets of mental models is extremely taxing, and when one has the potential to be addicting across a variety of personality types, I feel that it would be imperative to maintain a habit of checking phones only when leaving an environment meant for learning.

By creating a dichotomy of thought between a private world and current life, we drastically inhibit ourselves reduce the amount of uncertainty in our information processing. Outside of the incredibly capable, this leads us to the false mindset that this allows us to interpret our current situation more methodically, when approaching it from a familiar place (looking at things we're responsible for, alongside our facebook feeds or what have you). Furthermore, we always will have our phones on us, no matter what new content we'll face during the day, so no matter what new stranger's we'll see, we'll be able to not exist in their world as long as we have these wonderful little machines.