Life Glee / Getting in the Way of Yourself

The reliable interruption of anything mild

One honest observation, made without moralising, about what tends to end a quiet moment.

A phone will not interrupt something gripping. It interrupts the mild things, which is to say almost all of the ones in this magazine. A view out a window, a slow cup of something, five minutes of sitting still: these have no grip, and a device offering something faster will win nearly every time, without any decision being made. That is the observation, and it is not a complaint about the modern world. It is a statement about relative pull, and it would be true of anything else offering the same immediacy.

The useful consequence is narrow. If a small pleasure is worth having, it is generally worth putting the phone out of arm's reach for the length of it, which is often three or four minutes. Not away for the day, not in another room, and no rule is being introduced. Just far enough that picking it up is a decision rather than a reflex, because the reflex is the whole mechanism and the reflex is defeated by distance alone.

That is as far as this goes. There is no argument here about attention spans or how things used to be, and no suggestion that anybody is doing anything wrong. Phones are extremely good and the observation stands: the quiet moments are the ones they cost you, and a metre of table is usually enough to keep them.