Name: 私たちの電話の問題 (The Problem With Our Phones)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T07:04:46.000Z
Duration: 5 min 33 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

程度の副詞

The dark truth is that it’s
become very hard to find anyone

and certainly anything more interesting than a smartphone.

様態の副詞

we love our phones and would never want us
to give them up, but it is also gently aware

that these delightful gadgets bear a hidden
cost.

To say we are addicted to our phones is not
merely to point out that we use them alot.

It signals a darker notion: that we use them
to keep our own selves at bay. Because of

our phones, we may find ourselves incapable
of sitting alone in a room with our own thoughts

floating freely in our own heads, daring to
wander into the past and the future, allowing

ourselves to feel pain, desire, regret and
excitement. We are addicted to our phones

not because we rely on them, but to the extent
that we recruit them to a harmful project

of self-avoidance. They do not mean to hurt
us. But we may – and probably do – use

them to injure ourselves. Addiction sounds
horrible. But it is a hard name for a normal

inclination: a habit of running away from
the joys and terrors of self-knowledge.

We can look up so much on our phones: we can

(if we are inclined) check up the population
of Lima (8.473 million); who won the Ladies

Final at Wimbledon in 1997 (Martina Hingis);
the definition of ‘tautology’ (saying

the same thing twice, though in different
ways) or perhaps the author of that fascinating

quote ‘What you survive makes you stronger’
(Nietzsche). Yet this constant resource has

an unwitting, unfortunate side-effect. We
consult our phones, rather than ourselves.

It’s not that we actually know so many obscure
facts. But we already possess – in scattered,

unpolished forms – the raw material from
which a huge number of the very best insights

and ideas could be formed: if only we gave
them enough time and attention.

Almost since the beginning
of time, we have prized the opportunity to

get away from reminders of humanity and to
immerse ourselves in nature. We have wanted

to gaze on the grey indifference of the ocean
or the bright, incalculable, immensity of

the starry sky.  But our phones are the enemies of such experiences.

They keep intruding our small selves into

the picture. We may be on the edge of the
Grand Canyon; they are beeping in our back

pockets. We may be gazing at the southern
slopes of the Matterhorn; they are receiving

updates for a food delivery app back home.
They ask us never to forget our ego – and

the endless things that ail us. Without meaning
to, they strip away the help the grandeur

We constantly use our phones to keep track
of our appointments. But we are – if we

think about it – quite constrained around
the things to which we choose to be alerted.

There’s the automated reminder of the session
with the dentist; the alert to jog our memories

that it’s our parent’s anniversary or
the text message to let us know we’re due

to play a tennis match on Sunday afternoon.
But there are other – very different – appointments

we need to keep in mind. We need reminders
to keep appointments with ourselves: we need

to spend time with our own worries, to understand
them rather than just suffer the anxiety they create.

The grandest (and much the worst)
is our final appointment: with death. We don’t

know how many days we have left to count down.
But what we need reminding of is not the day

and the hour but the fact. Ideally we’d
get a message every morning: Memento, homo,

quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.
Remember you are made of dust and and will be dust again.

Our phones seem amazingly sophisticated: small

miracles of compressed, practical science,
working hand in hand with advanced Capitalism.

We think so highly of them because we compare
them to the past, rather than to the

of the future. They are so much more advanced
than any device we could possess twenty or

forty years ago. Yet they are almost unbearably
primitive, in comparison with what – ideally

– the long future will bring. We are still
so far from inventing the technology we really

require for us to flourish; capitalism has
delivered only on the simplest of our needs.

We can summon up the street map of Lyons but
not a diagram of what our partner is really

thinking and feeling; the phone will help
us follow fifteen news outlets but not help

us know when we’ve spent more than enough
time doing so; it emphatically refuses to

distinguish between the most profound needs
of our soul and a passing fancy. In the Utopia,

our phones will be wiser than we are. They
will be kind and not merely subservient. They

will know how to edge us away from a stupid
decision and how to summon up our better natures.

We deserve pity for having been born in such
primitive times. . . . .

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