Live Your Way into the Answer (or Don’t)
The first of many thoughts on why I hate my smartphone.
Those of you who migrated over here from Instagram know that I’m days away (9, to be exact) from ditching my smartphone—at least for the summer, possibly longer. Long before I knew I was really going to go through with it, I began writing about the whys and hows behind the idea. The writing I’ve been doing behind-the-scenes has been an attempt to discover where this bizarre, unshakable compulsion is coming from. (Writing is just the way I figure stuff out. Flannery O’Connor: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.”)
Why, every time I imagine the life I want, do I come back to this idea of a life without a smartphone? Why has this question—What would life feel like without a smartphone?—been nagging me nonstop for at least six months? Practically, I now suspect, this experiment is going to make my life harder, not easier, and yet I still want to do it.
Why???
Related story: I was in Atlanta at a work conference recently, sitting on a bench by a man in his seventies with a long white ponytail tucked under a baseball cap. We started talking, and he was quirky and, I thought, kind of nerdy. His black polo was covered in what looked like oil stains and his legs twitched with a nervous energy. Somehow the topic of me not using a smartphone for a while came up. His reaction was not incredulity and certainly not admiration. It was, unmistakably, pity. I could tell he was trying to think of a delicate way to say this, but he asked, “So, are you not very… social… then?” In other words, do you have literally no friends? Will no one find you if you die in your apartment, and will your own cat chew off your face while you rot in oblivion? I tried to defend myself by saying “No, no, very social—I actually think that might be part of the problem…” but the fellow was undeterred from feeling sorry for me. This story makes me chuckle every time I think of it, and it makes me feel like I should write a disclaimer here to the effect of “This is not because I have no friends.”
Anyway, some of you are curious about my reasons. One friend (see! a friend!) recently asked me why, if I’m so overwhelmed, I don’t just clear my smartphone or set app limits. My texted response was “I like to make things as hard as possible??”
Then I texted back, “Actually that should be on my headstone: ‘She liked to make things as hard as possible.’”
In the spirit of making things as hard as possible, here’s some thinking I did a few weeks ago about this decision. Per usual, the little meditation started in one place and ended in quite another, but for that I blame the deleterious, attention-eroding effects of my smartphone.
Usually when I’m working (often from home), I work in long chunks and “check” my phone in between. This “check” is rarely to browse social media—or at least it doesn’t begin that way.
Honestly, the fact that I can spend four or five uninterrupted hours working makes me feel pretty good about myself.
I can work in (sometimes bizarrely) long, focused stretches. Sometimes I realize I’ve been sitting for five hours and suddenly think BLOOD CLOT!!! and bolt out of my chair.
I don’t watch TikToks or scroll Instagram reels, just look at posts from people I know.
I put my phone in another room as soon as my husband is home from work, and I charge it in our bathroom instead of on my nightstand.
I mean, do they hand out trophies for this kind of discipline??
But something unpleasant is happening inside me, anyway.
I’ve been editing a book manuscript for the past week or so. While I’m working on a project like this, I need to recreate as best as possible the experience of reading it cover-to-cover. I print out all 250 pages of it, grab a real pen, and get to work. I have to retain everything I’m reading so I can remember where a passage needs to relocate or whether a character’s hair color has been mentioned already. I have to put my phone and laptop away. All the way away.
I’m an introvert, so I don’t get that FOMO-“what-is-everyone-else-doing?!” feeling when I put my phone away. I am quite content to, in the parlance of Sherlock Holmes, live inside “my mind palace.” Instead of worrying about what’s happening in the rest of the world, here’s what I’ve noticed:
Questions.
It starts with one. What is the weather like this afternoon?
I try to ignore it. But then: What time is W’s baseball practice Saturday?
I’ll look later. Is P’s birthday present going to arrive on time?
Did that editor get back to me? What was the charge for that event? What’s the title of that book I’m trying to reference? Did I make a reservation? Is this week Teacher Appreciation Week? Did I respond to that email? When am I taking a meal to that family?
The questions begin to form a rowdy queue, like impatient passengers waiting to board their train.
Is L supposed to wear tan or pink tights for her ballet photos? How many seasons are there of Veep? Is that guy still running for President?
The questions begin to shove, attempting to work their way to the front of the line.
Have all my students submitted their work? Could I recruit that woman I met to teach a class for us? Do I need dish detergent?
If I try to ignore them, they grow increasingly restless and loud. I can visualize this line, the discontented questions like cartoonish figures of the actual punctuation mark, but with eyes and arms and gloved-Mickey-Mouse-hands. I see chaos.
When is my mom getting back in town? What’s the other book by that author? How do you know if a toe bone is broken? Did I schedule a meal kit delivery for this week?
I have to breathe in. I have to say to myself, They can wait.
But in order to breathe, in order to say “They can wait,” I have to notice what is happening. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I pull out my phone to check the weather (a legitimate day-planning concern!), do eighteen other things, and slide my phone back into my bag… without ever checking the weather.
My phone tells me I spend more than 3 hours a day gazing into its blue light. 3 ½ hours a day is 1,277 hours a year, which will account for 2,661 DAYS in my remaining lifetime (if I live a very long time).
TWO THOUSAND, SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY-ONE DAYS.
If I’m going to spend thousands of days of my remaining life staring at an iPhone, I at least want to know what I’m doing it for. I’ve been trying to pay attention to how minutes accumulate so quickly and predictably day after day. I order a new pack of razorblades, look up a return code before going to UPS, pay a Venmo charge, answer a text, schedule pest control, check the calendar for a school play. I just do and do, and the more questions I attend to—the more questions I admit through the terminal gate—the more questions appear in line behind them.
On the Clifton Strengthsfinder exam, which my sister has used in her work in higher education, one of my top strengths is a quality called “input.” Since you are reading a newsletter when you could be lifting weights or mowing the lawn instead, there’s a decent chance it’s one of your strengths, too. Here’s what it means.
There is a natural inquisitiveness to the Input strength, a desire to know more, to ask questions, to find out the what, when, where, how and, especially, why. Their need to know more can be limited to a particular subject area—but often that is not the case; they want to know more about everything they encounter. Input collects—sometimes things, but often ideas or experiences.
Those with Input are archivers—storers, sorters and organizers of information. There is a utilitarian nature to Input; ideas and even objects are saved because they may be useful, either now or in the future. Input wants to know more—and wants you to know more too, often offering an article, a website, a book or a movie that you might find helpful, useful or entertaining. "Tell me more" is the mantra of Input.
Ha, hello, hi, nice to meet you.
It’s honestly a problem sometimes. I’m in love with podcasts, and I joke that I make a terrible dinner party guest because I know exactly thirty-minutes worth of information about everything. Thirty minutes worth is not enough to be smart about any given topic—but it’s plenty to feel smart, especially with a gin and tonic in your hand.
You can imagine where I’m going with this. For inputters, the internet (and even one’s own personal empire of digital information in the form of calendars and photos and notes) can feel like an infinite universe of things to know and collect. I am far more likely to do a deep dive than to scroll mindlessly, which means I don’t resonate with the typical screentime complaint of feeling like “I’ve wasted time.” I read long articles I find meaningful, about everything under the sun: from the physics of universe expansion to the reasons Hollywood writers are striking to the probability of a looming US recession.
Seems good, right?
But knowledge isn’t finish-able. When I put my phone away, a mild but unignorable anxiety starts to build, as if all those rowdy passengers need to push through to get to their train and I’m the only one who can swing open the gate. I feel, of course, the pressure of my actual to-do list, but I also have a panicky (usually subconscious) awareness of ALL the questions that could be answered (or go unanswered), from the practical to the scientific to the philosophical.
Slowly, over the past decade, I have become far more comfortable with not answering the big questions. But the small ones are making me crazy. I am cognitively jumpy.
I’ve been trying to let the questions pass through me, unanswered. If this sounds woo-woo, let me clarify. I don’t (mostly) mean Where do we go after we die?1
I mean What is the menu at that place we’re going Friday night?
A radical notion: I do not have to know the menu. I do not have to consider four days in advance whether I prefer salmon or steak.
Maybe this panicky feeling isn’t about technology. Maybe it’s about questions.
I am thinking of all the little ways our minds have been trained, maybe literally thousands of times a day, to get answers. Our society-wide (western) obsession with knowing the answers to a million small questions seems to have resulted in a compulsive checking-and-consulting-and-confirming habit. We can know, so we should know!
Maybe I am convinced that knowledge is finish-able, and that I can finish it. Or that I can at least arrive at a comfortable, satisfying place of knowing… if I just keep getting answers.
(I remember seeing a tweet once that said “what did people do before Google when they watched a television show and that awful nagging feeling of where have I seen this actor before?? came up?” And I’ve felt that—how can I possibly concentrate on this show until I answer that question? Can people have watched television for decades without knowing what other show a vaguely-familiar actor had been in? It is Guantanamo-scale torture!)
In the daily things of life, I am unaccustomed to mystery. Since the ordinary questions usually are answerable, I buy into the lie that all of them are. (Have you ever had the compulsion to Google something along the lines of “Why is that friend mad at me?” as though there is no knowledge outside the reach of the internet? I have.)
Sitting with questions feels almost like sitting in our own filth. Like, why do it? Just get up. Find the answer.
Of course we’re the first generation in all of history living under the illusion that every question has an answer. Only post-Enlightenment have people lived under the illusion of knowing the big answers; for thousands of years thunder was just the sound of God bowling in the sky.2 How can we leave any space for mystery in the big things if we don’t permit it in the small ones?
In the early 20th century, poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,
Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Questions as locked rooms. It’s a funny metaphor because, yes, it’s poetic, but who wants to stand outside a locked room? People only ever want to get inside the locked room. We’re curious! We want to be “in the know!” We’ll do just about anything to get in.
Human beings are progress machines. We cannot love a locked room, a book we cannot read. Not unless we believe there’s some (impractical, metaphysical) value to human inaccessibility, even if that value is just the reminder that human omniscience has always been a fantasy.
Yesterday my daughter was meeting friends somewhere and wanted me to ask another mom, in advance, what her daughter was wearing to the event. It’s a big thing for girls her age to know what to expect, wardrobe-wise, and I get that. It would have taken me all of two minutes to send the text, but I wouldn’t do it.
“It’s okay to not know,” I told her. “If you get there and everyone else is dressed differently, you can own that.”
I told her, You can sit inside the discomfort.
I told her, You can embrace the not knowing.
Well, okay, hi there, prevailing lesson of the last few years of my life.
Am I overthinking this? Is there a lesson inside the not-knowing? Don’t we all need embarrassment that doesn’t kill us? Opportunities to adapt? Even practice feigning confidence?
Isn’t there something meaningful to sitting just three hours longer with that tiny mystery—What if I am the only one? What will that feel like?
Will I be okay if I don’t know?
(Yes, I will.)
Out of necessity, letting the daily, ordinary questions “pass through me” is becoming (and I’m reluctant to admit this) something of a spiritual practice. I can, as I said, see them piling up, and I have to close my eyes and tell them to move along. I have to talk myself through it. I have to watch myself close the gate, to walk away, to allow the question to go bother someone else.
It’s funny because I’ve said here that I think the western world is in the midst of a knowledge crisis, which I think is a term I borrowed from Alan Jacobs. But how can we be in the middle of a knowledge crisis when we know so, so much? Are we in a knowledge crisis because we know so much?
Yes, my brain is becoming a pinball machine. But it’s worse than that. I think… my heart is? Like I am spiritually addled, emotionally discombobulated.
If the urge to forgo a smartphone isn’t practical, then what is it? It has to be spiritual right? It has to be about something else? Something, inside a progress-and-efficiency-obsessed culture, a little more embarrassing? (Ah, yes. “Don’t we all need embarrassment that doesn’t kill us? Opportunities to adapt? Even practice feigning confidence?”)
When I picture myself without a smartphone this summer, I picture myself outdoors (always), either in the driveway with my kids playing wiffle ball, or pulling weeds in my garden, or taking long walks. I know enough about myself to recognize this as hopelessly idealistic, and I know there is no version of my life (or at least not one in which I still have four children and a stupid, trash-eating dog) filled with nothing but birdsong and the laughter of small children.
But the urge to be untethered (to anything digital) is so strong that I can’t shake it. At the end of that quote from Rainer Maria Rilke are the words “Live your way into the answer.” Years ago, probably when I was a high schooler scrawling in my denim-covered diary from The Limited, I would have fixated on that word “answers.” “Live your way into the answers” would have sounded like a promise. Just try hard enough, I would have heard, and you will eventually get there (wherever “there” is). You are on the right road, and at the end of that road are answers.
Now what strikes me is not the word answers at all. It’s the word “live.” Live, as opposed to think or imagine or learn. Whatever the answers are, I don’t want to Google or scroll my way into them. I don’t want them to be right there, a few thumb-taps away.
I want to live my way into answers. Which is a fancy way of saying I’m tired of trying so hard, of believing that knowledge and theology and awareness are finish-able. I just want to do whatever it is I’m doing (cooking dinner, scrubbing mud off Converse sneakers with a magic eraser) and nothing else. I do think there’s value in slowness, on outcomes that are unpredictable. Can I cook the scallops without a recipe? Can I try to find the friend’s house without a moving map updating in real time, and can I handle getting lost? What kinds of answers are hidden in failure?
I can hear myself; really I can. Rationalism is the western air we breathe, so I know this sounds drippy and woo-woo and idealistic. But it’s also verifiable that, ten years ago, when my first daughter was born and I cared nothing about Instagram or even the news, I just lived a little bit slower and better and… more than I do now. These days living feels almost like an afterthought.
Am I wrong about this, that the smartphone is the problem? Am I foolishly chasing an unrealistic level of calm? Could I conserve more energy by accepting the world exactly the way it is and finding out how best to live in it?
Krista Tippett argues that the answers we get are the result of the types of questions we ask. (I’m sorry, by the way, that I keep quoting the same people on here. That won’t be forever; I just kind of go in cycles with who I’m reading/listening to.) Here’s Krista (we’re on a first-name basis at this point):
I have learned that questions elicit answers in their likeness — that answers rise or fall to the questions they meet. We’ve all seen this. We’ve all experienced it. It’s very hard to respond to a combative question with anything but a combative answer. It’s almost impossible to transcend a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. But the opposite is also true: it’s hard to resist a generous question. This is a skill that needs relearning, but I believe that we all have it in us to ask questions that invite, that draw forth searching in dignity and revelation. There is something redemptive and lifegiving about asking a better question.
I think there’s something redemptive in asking this question of myself: Who are you without a smartphone? (Which really means, Who are you without a calendar and fifteen text threads and endless buying power always at your fingertips? Which really means, who are you without efficiency and forward progress and answers, answers, answers?)
I can’t explain it to myself, and I sure can’t explain it to ponytail guy. Which might mean I’m every bit the idiot he seemed to think I am. Even so… what kinds of answers are hidden inside failure?
Although, duh, I think about this every day.
I mean, they didn’t really think this, but they might as well have.
Lindsey, thank you for that Flannery O'Connor quote. Wow. I love that. One of my most inefficient practices is to look for quotes that I've written down. I'll read something, and another quote comes to mind that I know I've written down, so I'll want to read them both and make the connection in real-time. It takes me a while to find the one I go looking for, but once I find it, it's like I've found a treasure all over again. So your post made me go looking through my commonplace books for a quote: "Where can we hear any whispers in the cacophony, behind the drama and trauma and fever dreams of our era? With our phones to our ears, life and our minds frequently feel like casinos now. There is no sun, no pocket of quiet, there don't seem to be exits, and the reception is terrible. Connection to anything real, to the ancient, to the mystical, to the moment, is weak, so there is bound to be existential exhaustion." Long live Anne Lamott. And long live you.