Attending to Life

When I pine for my phone, I can feel it on my skin, a tingle akin to a lover walking into the room. Patricia Lockwood calls it “the portal,” glowing with the promise of significance and connection. Smartphones act like the enchanted Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, which shows us what our heart desires, but never allows us to reach out and take it. Dumbledore tells Harry, after he’s sat up all night gazing at it, “Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.”

Perhaps I am especially susceptible to the lure of technological connection, unusually weak-willed, because I have sometimes felt like I am being driven mad. I have two young children and all too regularly have a phone in my hand when they are trying to talk to me. It always feels like something important, worth the moment of disconnection, but at a distance I can see that I am often just scrolling listlessly and restlessly. I have social media blockers on all my devices, which worked well until I discovered you could switch them off easily. They invented a locked mode; I learned to delete the blocker app. Now I download and delete my blockers multiple times a day, like an overeater hiding food from themselves and repeatedly opening the cupboard.

You might not associate this endemic distraction with sloth, but before there was sloth, there was acedia. Acedia is both the Latin word we now translate as sloth and for many centuries its precursor. It’s not simple laziness but a richer, more capacious concept, difficult to translate. I also think it is endemic, the unnamed temptation of our times.