One reason I refrain from smartphones and open-ended internet browsing, why I subscribe to silence and detachment as standard practice, is for the relish in the unknown and the unexplained.
I identify a singular trait differentiating the active smart phone user from the abstainer. That trait is the urge for a quick revelation: some readily palpable thread to the universally acceptable. That, beyond the pervasive urge to stay connected.
Like a supplementary brain nigh always at the fingertips, the device renders instant reconciliation of a creeping doubt nearly effortless, at least any doubt expressible in the form of a question-answer.
Most of my interactions with active smartphone users give some manifest of the above. Each passing year I face an increased struggle to maintain rapport with this profile.
One of the characteristics I most cherish in a human being is the taste for some mystery and the imprecise; the contentment in suspense. This differentiates us from machines crafted for rapid problem crunching.
With a smartphone, that ineffable boundary between man and machine suffers severe structural abuse. While it is not inherently our brain that mines the numbers, the brain primes for the expectation, the smart phone an immediately employable accessory. It extends our capacity to the likes of a genius IQ assistant lacking humour.
I don’t care to address so many questions. I rather leave matters afloat. I rather fantasize and play the amateur philosopher.
Not that I’m never swept in the opposite course. Not that I don’t evince behavior of plain discordance. Cybernetic influences bountiful, the methodology demands mindful pursuit.
I tend to observe myriads of animal and plant-based mechanics that remain to me a mystery. This may concern the semi-triangular formations of geese gliding along the lake. Or the similarly organized flocks of fowl roaming the skies. Or the fascinating ant colony structure.
And be it that I’ve forgotten how certain things operate or never adequately learned, I usually don’t care for the precise measurements that instant. I’m happy to appeal to intuition or even fabricate my own rationale, especially in rare moments of spontaneity across issues of sparing consequence.
A smartphone frenzied companion would probably resolve to ease my burden. The person would entreat me to Google it or at least emphasize how feasibly, how swiftly such an inquiry would clear up all wonder; or undertake the matter personally, then and there.
Questions of purely academic curiosity often alight in conversation. Like an expression of unclear origin, a historical conundrum, a socioeconomic metric or a foreign word whose meaning we can’t intuit. A smartphone partisan would feel an insurmountable itch to Google it there at the dining table, never mind the otherwise engaging interchange.
Once that occurs, or even at the mere suggestion, the balloon bursts. The magic dissipates.
Where is that human capacity to embrace the tension? To circumnavigate open matters? To hypothesize, conjecture? To leave the analytics for later in presence of an organic exchange?
That motion towards immediate resolution takes the piss out of the affair. Even this idiomatic expression I must have acquired from some film long back. But I’m not the least bit anxious for the source.
There’s beauty in the unresolved. We might recognize this, yet neglect in practice.
An ancient, esoteric proverb allures all the more once left to independent interpretation, rather than drilled in plain, transparent form.
Poetry, if you ask me, bears greater fruit when unobstructed with endless clarifying remarks. Along similar territory, I find literature far more charming when left to own interpretative faculty, rather than subject to rigorous critique and demystifying commentary.
Foreign language acquisition gains greater traction once strongly emphasized the general flow, questions left unanswered for a time, holes unpatched. Compare that to the imparting of each unclear subtlety, generally characteristic of academic programs and learning platforms.
For what it’s worth, a person’s very appeal heightens once motives and behaviors cannot be readily anticipated or explained.
Be content with the unknown, fellow species.
Questions, comments? Connect.