Living in the Moment, Not a Phone in Sight!
As a product of the internet I spend way too much time looking at memes and thinking about what they say about as a society because sometimes seemingly random internet nonsense can be pretty revealing.
If you are, like me, a denizen of the world wide web then you are undoubtedly familiar with the phrase “Not a cell phone in sight. Just people living in the moment.”
A popular meme format puts those mock-sanctimonious words alongside pre-internet tableaus involving brutality, murder and other rampaging darkness.
According to the good folks at Know Your Meme, an invaluable resource I look up regularly, the origin of the meme was a November 4th, 2018 Tweet by @VersaceCroccs that paired an image of Jesus dying on the cross with the phrase.
The inference was clear: clearly Jesus would rather be playing Candy Crush or doom-scrolling Twitter than have nine inch nails pounded into his hands before dying on a crucifix.
As is often the case with memes, “Not a cell phone in sight. Just people living in the moment” is a parody of posts from boomers of an idyllic pre-internet image of kids splashing around in the old swimming hole or fishing accompanied by that ubiquitous phrase.
The non-ironic version of this online trope that I am most familiar with shows a beach full of impossibly beautiful, thin people from sometime in the early 1970s or late 1960s.
Sometimes this image is juxtaposed with unflattering images of overweight people in the present to drive home the idea that the past was infinitely better than the present because everyone knew how to lustily embrace life and also nobody was overweight because unhealthy food hadn’t been invented yet.
The internet being the internet, ironic versions of this trope are so ubiquitous that it’s hard to find a non-ironic version.
But there is a real reactionary impulse behind this simple-minded belief that the world was a glorious utopia and then the iPhone was invented and our utopia morphed into a dystopia because, in the minds of boomers, iPhones are too good. They’re such a dazzling form of technology that they’ve created generations of slaves to technology who would rather stare mindlessly at a phone than lead a non-virtual life.
We have an innate human tendency to distrust contemporary technology while fetishizing the technology of our childhood.
I am old enough to remember a time before the rise of the iPhone. Hell, I’m old enough to have come of age in that world. I remember finding out about iPods, Youtube and iPhones for the first time and being blown away. It didn’t just seem like a huge leap forward: it felt borderline magical.
Because I am so old I remember what life was like before iPhones. Before the iPhone people didn’t spend their nights having meaningful conversations with their families or exercising or reading books; they watched television.
We all watched a LOT of television. Our culture revolved around television. When I was a kid television was the great boogyman that was destroying society and turning our children into brain-dead zombies.
As a kid I mainlined television. I was addicted to it. I didn’t live in the moment because that might result in me missing an HBO movie that might have boobs in it that ran at 1:30 in the morning.
The internet and iPhones have overtaken television in no small part because they give us new and better ways of consuming television.
The internet has proven a boon to introverts like myself who like a little distance between themselves and the rest of the world. Actually, it'd be more accurate to say that I like a LOT of distance between my fragile, broken brain and a world I often find terrifying, unknowable and terrifyingly unknowable. I courted my wife through my iPhone and the internet. The internet has provided a home for my writing in the form of this wonderful website and allowed a supportive and welcoming community to grow around it.
I am in favor of living in the moment in theory and i should probably spend less time on my phone, which is addictive and not terribly healthy but let’s not pretend that we didn’t find plenty of other ways to not live in the moment that did not involve iPhones or the internet.
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