Midnight in Paris is one of my all-time favorite movies. I can watch it over and over again because it captures the core of one of my obsessions, nostalgia for the past. The belief that life was simpler and possessed an effervescent charm that has disintegrated into the unappreciative sands of time. This emotion is really triggered when I look at my iPhone in my hand. The root cause of all my resistance and distraction in life. Or maybe better put, the device that has a stranglehold on my own ability to focus kept alive and masked consistently by my weak rationalizations.
I always think, “Back when I had a flip phone I could text, make calls and take the occasional grainy pictures of a baby that I thought put me in the likes of Anne Geddes and that was all the device was intended to do. It was so much less distracting.” The truth is twenty to thirty years ago our distractions lived in other “devices” not created by Steve Jobs. We humans are wired, and have been wired the same way for generations. I don’t want to blame the device. We are to blame, but the beauty in that is that we are the ones that control the change. Free will at it’s finest.
This week’s thought question: What would you lose or gain with a flip phone for a week?
