📱 Just Say No to Cellphones

Thoughts on Unplugging from the Matrix

🏖 Excerpted from MUSINGS FROM A SMALL ISLAND …

Sol Luckman

For the past four years, I’ve managed to survive on my small island without owning a cellphone. I know, I know—it might be easier to believe in power animals than in my ability to last more than a day without a communication device of some kind attached to my person. Call me Robinson Crusoe.

To be totally honest, I’ve never had a cellphone of my own. If I really need to make a call while I’m out and about, I borrow someone else’s. If I want to surf the internet, I emulate our forefathers and use a computer. Instead of texting I usually do something rather more archaic: I email people.

It’s true that going without a cellphone does create minor inconveniences. I can’t text my way through uncomfortable social gatherings. I can’t waste my time—and yours—snapping selfies and posting them to Instagram. I can’t even enjoy a stress-busting moment of watching porn from behind the wheel of my SUV.

But the trade-off is worth it. I feel freer not having a cellphone. I feel healthier not irradiating my brain with every long-distance conversation. I’m not constantly at other people’s beck and call like a property manager with a pager. I’m not forever tempted to hog-tie myself to a virtual reality while ignoring ... reality.

Perhaps most importantly, I don’t have to give away my cellphone number to social media platforms harvesting my data so that my every move (on and offline) can be tracked by alphabet agencies.

Can you hear me now?

Rather than being beacons of progress, cellphones encapsulate much of what is wrong with modern society. They’re the epitome of a bizarre combination of extreme narcissism and comatose disregard for the loss of privacy, sovereignty and safety that stem from blindly giving away one’s power to corporations ... including that ubercorporation known as the government.

Many things about Millennials make me cringe (fedoras and lobe gauging come to mind), but their fetishistic worship of all things cellphone probably tops the list. I guess in the not-so-distant future when Millennials start lining up like good little communists to have tiny 5G cellphones shaped like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s smug face implanted in their neocortex, I’ll have to pass on that, too.

Here’s a joke with more than a little truth to it ...

Q: How many Millennials does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Ten. One to screw in the light bulb and nine to talk to each other about it on their cellphones.

I’m aware, of course, that other demographics are also heavily dependent on cellphones. Call girls, for example. Also proctologists, who these days can’t seem to lift a finger without using it to swipe a screen. Really, professionals of all types are superglued at the hip to their cellphones.

The party line has always been that cellphones help us do more, have more and be more by bringing us closer together. My contrarian position is that cellphones have proved themselves the technological equivalent of the opioid epidemic—and they do just about as much to establish clear lines of communication.

Have you ever played the telephone game in which a statement is whispered from person to person until it becomes completely different and often totally unintelligible? That’s how cellphones work—only on a massive scale.

Sol Luckman has eloquently written a witty, insightful memoir in MUSINGS FROM A SMALL ISLAND: EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN. As an art major, I thoroughly enjoyed Sol’s humor and philosophical thoughts on the elusive purpose of art and his expression of life on his small island. His love of bodysurfing and descriptions of the tourist environment at the beach were hilarious and an observation I share, having lived in Florida for many years. I laughed out loud for the first fifty pages. This book is not all humor, though. In this open display of musings by Sol, he bares his soul and reveals some of his struggles with a nasty funk and how he used bodysurfing to overcome personal challenges.

MUSINGS FROM A SMALL ISLAND hit a distinct chord with me. I must be a kindred spirit (or perhaps a spirit animal?). His sarcasm had me grinning as his thoughtful descriptions of tourists’ bicycle etiquette, country music, palmetto trees, politics, cell phones, and life, in general, delighted me because I so agree with him. This justifiably opinionated author is a prolific artist, poet, and mixologist. And as if that isn’t enough, there’s more. The art stands alone. I loved his paintings! The simplicity of his work falls somewhere between abstract, modernist, and minimalist. His work is so good that I left the book briefly to research his website, where I found more than five hundred examples of his colorful portrayals of life. It was a joy reading the musings of Sol Luckman. So joyous, I’ll reread it. I may even buy one of his paintings. —Nancy Tobin for Readers’ Favorite

As a thought experiment, which of the following all-too-common public behaviors do you find more annoying?

1. The One-sided Yellfest in which all you can hear is a stranger next to you bellowing into a cellphone; or

2. The Two-way Screamfest in which the stranger next to you bellows into a cellphone and, with the speaker function on, a stranger you can’t see bellows back.

If you answered “neither,” you’re part of the problem. You should lock away your cellphone and seek psychological help immediately.

Personally, I can’t decide which of the above scenarios pisses me off more. Both situations are intolerable to any sane, civil person. Talk about a space invasion.

Clearly, the only thing to do is ban cellphones in public. Call me a Luddite. To which I say: “Luddites unite!”

Or maybe public banning isn’t required. Public shaming might work better. If liberals can derive power from the politics of shame, why can’t those of us who actually want humanity to survive and thrive play at this game? We could retool the old Gallagher joke for how to handle bad drivers to fit today’s cellphone threat.

Instead of reckless and/or careless drivers receiving citations for individual infractions, Gallagher, the comedian who became famous for smashing watermelons onstage and drenching a good portion of his audience, hilariously proposed that all vehicles should be equipped with high-powered suction cup guns with darts labeled “asshole.”

This would allow drivers to self-police. All the cops would have to do would be to look for the vehicles with the most darts stuck to them.

If cellphones came with, say, semipermanent “douchebag” stickers that could be easily applied with a gentle touch, as a civilization we could forego having to place an outright ban on cellphones in public.

Another solution would be for the planet to be hit by a gigantic solar CME (coronal mass ejection), a Carrington Event powerful enough to take down the entire communication grid and return us all to our senses.

Strictly speaking, I’m not anti-technology; I’m pro-human. I’m against anything and everything that keeps people from reaching their innate potential.

Which makes me just itch to ask: Alexa, if people rely on you to do everything for them, how can they ever learn to do anything for themselves?

In the unlikely scenario where we could strike a balance with technology and use it to create more freedom and self-sufficiency in all areas of our lives, I’d be on board in a heartbeat. But as things stand, we’re on a slippery slope to virtual enslavement and technological codependence with respect to our bodies as well as our minds.

Here’s a challenge that could change your life for the better. Put away your cellphone for a week.

Do it cold turkey. Give it to someone to keep for you if you don’t trust yourself. And then see if, after the delirium tremens passes, you don’t feel like a different, maybe even a better person.

You might just start getting rid of other chains that have bound you. Siri, for starters. Or your job. Or your spouse.

Hell, you might even drag and drop your city in the trash, move to a small island, and start your life over with a clearer head and lighter heart.

Copyright © Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.