The Phone

 Due to staffing issues, I got stuck at my job in a small town in northern Manitoba not for two weeks but for a whole month. It was the last week. And I had yet another new partner. His name was Daniel. He was the third one this month. He arrived late in the evening, and I didn’t bother with long introductions or chatting—just introduced myself and went to bed. The next day, I observed him. Since he was new, I had to train him, though I don’t really enjoy it. But his training went smoothly and was interesting because he asked questions to understand the meaning of things, not to blindly follow my answers. He also never asked me or anyone else about salaries or payments; he didn’t bring up money at all. That meant money itself didn’t interest him much. Plus, I didn’t see him latching onto people for pointless chats, so crowd attention wasn’t a big deal to him either. But I noticed one thing he did almost constantly throughout the day: singing. He was always humming something under his breath. At the end of the workday, I asked him if he was a singer. Daniel said yes, he was a singer and already had a few songs; he also made music and played the piano. I was thrilled to hear I’d met a creative person here. On the way home, he played me his songs. I didn’t listen to what he was singing—I listened to how he sang. And it felt like he was singing with his soul. That evening, at home, I told him my thoughts about him and his singing. He thanked me and was even touched, which surprised me because I hadn’t done anything special—just said what I thought. But if it mattered to him, fine. After that, we started talking, looking for common interests. At some point, our conversation veered toward languages, and Daniel said music is a language too. I liked that he didn’t just parrot that well-known phrase but said it sincerely, with belief in his words. I agreed, of course. I believe any form of creativity—music, drawing, dancing, woodworking, cooking, anything where you can express imagination—is a language of the soul. Daniel also asked me what I like to do, and I said I love thinking and sometimes write down my thoughts. He got curious, and I let him read a few of my earliest stories. He liked them and said I could probably write about anything. At that moment, I thought it’d be a great challenge and asked him to name any object, and I’d try to write about it. He chose a phone. So this story is about a phone. Daniel also said he could freestyle, and I couldn’t resist giving him words. He masterfully wove each word into rhymes on the spot, with such ease it was like he wasn’t even thinking about it. I was delighted and amazed—it was incredible. He said it’s harder with beats, but even that’s no issue for him, thanks to hours of practice. It was all astonishing because Daniel had already mastered what I’m only starting to learn.

Well, I think it’s time to get to the main topic of this story. The modern phone is a vast subject for reflection. I doubt that when Alexander Bell invented the telephone, he could’ve imagined how much his creation would change over time and how functional it would become. So I’d like to focus on the original purpose of this device: the ability to talk to someone far away. That’s not surprising now, but I’m sure in the early years, people saw it as something utterly astonishing, almost magical. In times when the fastest way to send information was Samuel Morse’s telegraph, it took a lot of time to transmit messages due to the special language developed for the device, plus a trained operator to send them, which immediately killed any privacy in the conversation. You also had to wait for your telegram to be delivered by a courier, so it was more like mail than a regular talk. That’s why Bell did the impossible. He didn’t just invent a way to communicate—he overcame space and time, letting people talk without delay, over long distances, and privately. He can rightfully be called a genius of his time. I want to emphasize again that people who used the telephone gained more free time. I’ll touch on this point a few more times later.
Time passed, and many things changed. Everything changed—from design and weight to the way information is transmitted. Only one thing stayed the same: the ability to talk to someone despite the distance. I don’t want to dive into all the changes to this invention over 147 years, so I’ll jump straight to the functionality of the modern smartphone.
Thanks to various apps, we now have so many possibilities I couldn’t list them all. So I’ll start with the functions that make our lives easier. One of the main ones is online banking. Now, you don’t need to go to a bank to make a transfer. I remember my dad driving to the city to pick up his paycheck, spending over half a day on it. Now, to get money from work or elsewhere, you just need to provide your account or card number. To pay bills, you don’t have to stand in lines at service providers’ offices or hunt for an ATM or bank branch to check your balance—just a couple of clicks on your smartphone. This saves a ton of time that can be used for something else, and I’ve only mentioned one app. We shouldn’t underestimate small apps like weather forecasts or calculators either. Now, you don’t have to wait for the weather report on TV or radio—just glance at a widget; you don’t even need to open it. Same with calculators—you don’t have to search for one or grab paper and a pencil to do some math; the phone’s always at hand. It seems like a small thing, but if you add up all these apps, you save a lot of time. And that’s not even counting that phones can control other things that make life easier and save time, like smart homes. Press one button in an app, and the vacuum starts cleaning the apartment on its own—you don’t even need to be home, which is better since you don’t hear it humming. With a tap, you can start the washing machine, kettle, or cook food in a multicooker, all while heading home from work, saving a ton of time.

But smartphones aren’t just about time. They have tons of convenient features. Take maps and navigation, for example. Thanks to them, I’m not afraid of getting lost no matter where I am. Phones now have cameras—really good ones that shoot video and take photos in pretty high resolution. Just because of maps and cameras, you don’t need to lug around a huge paper map, compass, camcorder, or camera. Touchscreens are a nice perk too. You can pull up a keyboard or watch a movie, especially since screens now are high-quality with good displays and high refresh rates. You can also connect your phone to a TV or projector to watch a film on a big screen. Plus, phones have decent speakers—if you don’t have a good speaker or headphones handy, you can play music right from the phone. We also have a ton of messengers and email, where agreements in some countries are considered legally binding. We don’t even need wallets anymore—you can add all your bank cards to your phone and pay with NFC. Smartphones have replaced so many things in our lives. Even what I’m writing right now, I’m doing on my phone.
Another important aspect is aesthetics. I’m not just talking about convenient shapes but also colors and design choices. If a person interacts with an object, that object has to be beautiful. For many, this is a deciding factor when choosing a smartphone. Thin bezels, rounded edges, a discreet front camera, a glass body, an aluminum frame, unique camera placement, a brand logo, and the color can’t just be black—it has to be cosmic gray to catch a buyer’s eye. Designers have to keep surprising people. A phone today isn’t just a practical, convenient object—it’s a work of art.

At first glance, it’s one of the best things humanity has right now. But is it really? I’ve learned more than once that everything needs balance. The better, more convenient, and functional a phone becomes, the more helpless we become. Start with navigation. I can’t even quickly tell where south or north is anymore—I don’t need to; I can just use a compass. I get lazy about learning a foreign language because I always have a translator at hand. Because we have so many social networks and messengers, people stop talking in real life. Guys and girls are now scared to meet on the street—it’s all done on dating apps, where some find it easier to lie about themselves, and others find it easier to tell the truth. But when these people meet, they often act differently than in chats because face-to-face communication is a whole different skill, one we’re sadly losing.
Thanks to smartphones, we have access to a huge amount of information, and search engines keep getting better and more convenient. But if we rely only on them, won’t we lose the skill of finding information from other sources? Where we gain something, we lose something. It happens quietly because you get used to the good stuff fast. But is something good always something necessary? Take sugar, for comparison. It’s a great product. It’s used to make tons of sweets, added to dishes and drinks to make them tastier. But does our body need it? I don’t think so, unless someone wants a drug-like addiction—sugar hooks you hard. If you ban a sweet-tooth from eating anything with sugar, you’ll see a monster and real withdrawal symptoms. Obesity, diabetes, cavities, atherosclerosis—that’s not even the full list of diseases sugar can bring. If you think about it, is a cake worth it? You could grab some fruit, honey, or maple syrup—those are sweet too, but no sugar.
That’s not the main problem, though. If you sum up all the conveniences we’ve gained, only then do you see what we’ve lost. Conveniences aren’t just conveniences anymore—they’ve become necessities. If you took away electricity, fuel, stores, factories, transportation, everything that isn’t pure nature, and left humanity alone with nature, what would happen? How many people could survive? It wouldn’t be about conveniences anymore—it’d be about survival. When we gain something new, we have to pay for it. And I think we’re paying too high a price just to live more comfortably.
I’d like to return to the question of free time. Since we have so much more free time, we need to spend it somewhere. And we have a ton of options. The main ways people spend free time now are watching movies and playing video games. It’s really interesting and engaging, often even useful, but I see a big problem that’s right on the surface, yet we prefer to ignore it. The problem is that even though we have video games that let us make story choices and interactive films that let us pick how events unfold, it’s nowhere near enough, and the options are always limited within the story’s framework. The choices are usually pre-prepared by someone else, not you. There’s no real freedom in this—just what we’re given. I’m not saying it’s bad or that we should ban movies and video games, of course not. It’s each person’s choice how to spend their time. We have a lot of freedom in that sense. It’s up to us how we use that freedom. Short videos on various platforms are super popular now, usually lasting up to thirty seconds. They often show people sharing opinions or famous quotes from great philosophers, open to interpretation. Someone drowning in all this, trained from school to blindly believe everything they’re told, loses the ability to think independently. For them, any nonsense said with a serious face is truth. I see videos where someone approaches passersby and asks, “If a car is going ninety kilometers per hour, how long will it take to travel ninety kilometers?” Many don’t know the answer. Some say “half an hour,” some say “an hour and a half,” one even said, “twenty minutes, if you drive fast.” It’s like they missed half the question. People stop analyzing even the simplest things. That’s the price we pay for mindlessly consuming information we don’t need. We think we’re resting and relaxing, but it’s only rest for the body. The brain, meanwhile, keeps processing tons of information and stays active. But unlike at work or elsewhere, where we make decisions, here we’re just fed ready-made info. That’s not rest. You might think I’m saying TV, video games, and other entertainment content are bad. But no, that’s not what I mean. They can’t be good or bad on their own. We decide if they’re good or bad for us. It’s each person’s choice. Take cars, for example. A car itself can’t be good or bad—it has no inherent meaning. But for some, it’s transportation; for others, a source of income, a showpiece for bragging, a collector’s item, or even a deadly killing machine, since it claims so many lives in accidents yearly. But these are all meanings we assign to a thing that’s just a collection of parts and nothing more. It’s the same with phones. It’s just an object that carries no meaning on its own. We decide how to use it and whether it benefits us or wastes our time. Schools now ban smartphones during lessons and tests. Why? So kids don’t get distracted or cheat? What does the smartphone have to do with it? Wouldn’t it be better to explain to the kid why they shouldn’t do that? Kids are little adults; you can talk to them. People seem to forget that you don’t have to just teach kids your stereotypical thinking, denying them a chance to figure things out themselves, without even explaining why what you say is right. You can talk to kids. Not just control them, project your traumas onto them, or try to live out your unfulfilled dreams through them. You can have conversations with kids. And that’s primarily the parents’ responsibility. People who have kids need to realize this huge responsibility. But what can someone realize, what can they teach a kid, if they’re convinced that a car going ninety kilometers per hour will cover ninety kilometers in twenty minutes?

People are losing the ability to think, and it’s scary. It seems like all our modern conveniences and comforts give us more freedom, but in reality, they’re just caging us—or rather, we’re willingly walking into the cage.