Postcards From Across the Pond

Let me start by assuring you that I am not addicted to my smartphone.

Although, hang on while I check my phone for symptoms…

“Smartphone addiction, also known as ‘nomophobia’ (fear of being without a mobile phone), is often fuelled by an Internet overuse problem or Internet addiction disorder.”

Well, there you go. I certainly don’t have that, because I don’t fit any of the criteria:

• Information overload: That’s absurd; it simply can’t happen. And we know this because, in an article in Scientific American, it was noted that the memory capacity of a human brain was equal to 2.5 petabytes. I’m sure you’re aware that a petabyte is 1024 terabytes, or one million gigabytes, so the average human brain can accumulate the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes of memory, an impossible volume to overfill. In addition to that, the brain never truly runs out of storage capacity, per se, as a single human brain has many different kinds of memories, so there is no physical limit to the capacity of the brain. As Sir Henry Hallett Dale (OM GBE FRS)—co-winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology, which he shared with Otto Loewi—stated in a lecture at Cambridge University in 1957, “The….

Like trying to fill a teacup with a firehose.

• Cybersex Addiction: Again, how absurd. I’m too old, too tired, and I’m not really sure what it is but I’m pretty sure I would injure myself.

• Gambling: I worked too hard and too long to acquire the money I have, and I have no urge to hand it over to strangers because Black came up instead of Red, or the 5:2 favourite, Wheel of Bacon, fell at the second furlong.

• Aggravated Attention Deficit Disorder: This is the silliest one of all. I certainly don’t have…hey! Look! There’s a squirrel in that tree!

Squirrel!

So that’s settled: I do not have smartphone addiction, even if I do possess one of the most basic and telling symptoms: I sleep with my phone.

Let me stress that I do not do this because I am addicted to my phone (because I’m not), I do it because that’s where I plug it in at night. And it is an ingrained part of my morning routine.

It is, however, becoming a problem (though not an addiction). Every night I plug the phone in. The Do Not Disturb automatically activates at 10 pm to keep it from going off when one of my family sends me a text at 3:17 am (10:17 pm their time), and it sits quietly until I wake up. And this is where the problem begins.

Everyone has a morning routine, and everyone knows they are not to be trifled with. Mine involves me—while still lying in bed—unplugging my phone, synchronizing my activity tracker, checking how far I am along my current challenges (88 miles—or 4%—on the Appalachian Trail), performing my daily update of the Zoe Health Study App (a habit I acquired during Lockdown 1.0 and see no reason to quit), reading emails, and opening my news feed.

It’s the final action that is becoming a problem.

I started checking the news first thing some years ago, just to see if the world was still there, but now I’m not sure if I want to know. Every morning the headlines pile up—none of them cheery or even the least bit hopeful—and I end up getting out of bed feeling like someone just shot my dog, or I’ve just been told I have only two years left to live, which sometimes, I have been.

And yet, I cannot turn away. It’s the “accident on the highway” syndrome where, even though you know it will give you nightmares, you can’t help but slow down and gape at the gore spread across the tarmac. I don’t want to look, but I can’t seem to help it. Sometimes I tell myself that this morning will be different and there will be a news story that doesn’t boil my bile.

I am not, however, going to tell you what sort of news stories set me off, or—God forbid—offer up an actual headline; do I look crazy? (Wait, let me check the mirror. Okay, you have a point. But I am not stupid; I have a certificate to prove it.)

Yeah, I let my Mensa membership expire, but it’s not like
I became suddenly stupid on the first of April, 1989.

Maybe, to keep me from feeling like I’m on my way to a funeral every morning, I should substitute something else in place of the news. The weather, perhaps. How depressing can that be?