I want to conduct an experiment, and I would love it if you played along. Give yourself a point for every one of the situations I list below. One point for each one that makes you think, “Oh God, been there.” Let’s go:
Feeling irritation when a text you’ve sent isn’t responded to swiftly.
Feeling just a bit slighted when someone sends a low-effort comment or emoji.
Rage at a slow loading website or app opening.
Fury when sent to customer service and you can’t get a person to talk to.
Offended by slow drivers, slow turners, bad parkers in parking lots.
Feeling invisible or insignificant if your post doesn’t get enough likes or shares or plays.
Frustration with a slow delivery driver when you DoorDash food.
Treating silence as an insult.
Scrolling endlessly when you have even a moment of time to kill waiting for something.
Real life “seems” to be the problem, but somehow, we keep blaming smartphones for everything, don’t we? We point at studies showing the rise of bullying, of depression, of anxiety, of the dissolving attention spans and endless scrolling and the lack of mindfulness. Whatever the problem, we point at the screens in our hands, the date that the iPhone was rocketshipped into our little world, and we make little graphs that prove our theory.
I think we’re missing the point, I think we’ve always been missing the point. I think we’re scapegoating and placing all the blame on the little computers in our palms. I think we’re missing the real rot:
Entitlement.
We’re gods now, are we not? Whatever it is you wish for, you need, you crave, desire, wonder about, a single tap of a finger away.
Hungry? Tap DoorDash or UberEats, scroll for twenty minutes watching other people live out other lives, and your meal appears at your doorstep.
Want music? Any song, from any genre, from any decade since the technology to record was invented, is streaming instantly from Spotify or Apple Music, Tidal or Amazon.
Bored? Watch a movie, any movie, without moving from your bed.
Craving validation? Do a post, wait for the Hearts to appear, fluttering up until they fill the screen.
Want outrage? Oh you’ll find it. Join X, join TruthSocial, wait .03 seconds.
Want to be right? The algorithm is brilliant at echo chambers.
Need a fact? ChatGPT will invent one for you, sometimes it might be right, but right doesn’t really matter anymore.
Want a connection? Swipe. Match. DM. Netflix and Chill.
Want distraction? Endless. Absolutely endless.
We are gods now, for the first time in history, we’re all tiny gods. According to recent studies, 91% of all Americans alone own a smartphone, and spend almost 4.5 hours a day on them. 91% of Americans spend 30% of their waking lives as minor deities, and then wonder, truly, why real life feels like such an insult.
We set our phones down, from time to time we still must (for now), and all around us is friction. Friction from the pieces of our lives that are still, for now, uncontrollable by our thumbs and fingers. A long line at the DMV, a real-life conversation with a real-life person that needs to happen but will be uncomfortable at best, a tragedy that cannot be scrolled away, these are the moments that our digital god status fails us. These are the moments we’re reminded with stunning clarity that we are just humans still, in a very human world.
The world in our palms is fast paced, it’s colorful, it’s literally designed to be the dopamine spiking slot machine that keeps us playing, that keeps us pulling the levers, that keeps us seeking, though we know not what we’re even searching for. Real life? Not so much.
Real life is slow.
The entitlement I speak of, the root cause, is not born from the little devices we created, it’s from the realization that while we might feel like it when we scroll, we are not, in fact, the gods we’ve always wanted to be.
When we believe the world is at our fingertips, when this belief is reinforced on a daily, an hourly, a constant basis, we start to think otherwise. We control the digital world on our devices, and when the real world does not, or cannot respond in kind, every other evil we currently blame on our technology, begins to emerge.
What if bullying comes when people do not react the way we wish them to, when they do not acquiesce to the demands we’re making? What if laziness is just the entitlement of being able to outsource the more time-consuming or annoying or routine tasks with a tap of the finger? What if all our narcissism is just the entitlement telling us that we are owed the validation that comes when we share yet another update of our life, our outfits, our thoughts, to the world that has probably never spent a moment in our physical presence?
To risk sounding like Yoda, I believe entitlement leads to expectation, instant response means instant gratification. Expectations not always being met leads to disappointment, after all, real life is messy, it’s slow, it’s mostly routine. This disappointment leads to anger, and this anger is the domino that brings forth the bullying, the trolling, the snark. This anger leads to more narcissism, the idea that if the world isn’t seeming to want to bend around our desires, we’ll center ourselves so it must. With narcissism comes laziness, why try when everything should be easy, when we deserve easy.
Our abilities now, granted by the shining Gorilla Glass in our hands, make us completely intolerant to ambiguity, as if every answer is Google-able, why shouldn’t we know? The entitlement to our own certainty has made us incapable of coping with complexity, with nuance, be it in conversation, or in life. We have been taught that every thought deserves a certain minimum of degree of dopamine in response, a threshold it must meet. When the real world, or the other “real world” the algorithm is presenting us denies that, it’s not just disappointment, it’s god damn injustice.
Worst of all, is the entitlement of editing, and our ability to do so. When we are able to edit everything in our digital worlds, cropping out distractions in photographs, flaws from our faces, fast-forward through boring bits, deleting old versions, skipping ads, only listening to our favorite songs, we come to expect, to demand, that ability in our real lives. Rage stems from that entitlement not being met, from the realization that real people, real life, doesn’t come with an Undo, a fast forward, a mute button.
We’ve created devices that tell us we’re gods, that teach us to expect everything instantly, and that we can change whatever it is we do not like. Life, on the other hand, does not. Life takes its time, life hurts, life disappoints, life refuses to be filtered.
If the real rot is entitlement, if this is the root of the evils we’re suffering from, maybe a rebellion is in order, and maybe the biggest rebellion is the simplest:
Reminding ourselves we are human, after all.
The world doesn’t owe us anything at all. Maybe this is the point of it, and always has been. Maybe we’ve gotten so consumed believing our own bullshit, that we are the Sun to the universe around us, that we’ve lost sight of the beauty of what Is. Maybe life is miraculous and beautiful because it is flawed and slow and frustrating and broken in so many ways. Maybe the moment we stop expecting it to obey, it starts to look this way again.
In vulnerability, in patience, in waiting, is peace. These are the antidotes to entitlement. Here’s a thought, a challenge, that I think we can all agree to. Let’s call it the Human Wait, and force ourselves at least once a day (to start) to wait 60 full seconds when we feel the urge to Google an answer to a question, to send another instant message. Let’s force ourselves to be patient, to wait. Then, let’s broaden that to forcing ourselves to driving ourselves to pick up our meals or groceries, forcing ourselves to sit in the line without scrolling, to watch the movie without pausing it to check our phones.
Our phones may have made us gods, may have crowned us royalty, but it’s our choice if we continue to believe it, to wear it. We don’t have to. Not any more. Let’s call this place the Recovering Digital Gods Support Group, and get each other through it. This newsletter isn’t just commentary, it’s action, and I think we can make this place a weekly reminder, a manual, for re-entering this real world, this messy, slow, frustrating, beautiful place.
We became tiny gods with our fancy glass screens and then feel furious when the real world doesn’t kneel. No longer.
No more.
The work of being a human can begin here, together. Join us.
We convince ourselves
we are the gods of this place.
This is our evil.
