Tag Archives: phone

Still relevant six years later

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I wrote and shared this poem on October 30th, 2020:

A Life Consumed

Overstimulated, over stressed,
Anxiety heightened but not addressed.

Faces lit in a constant glow,
From a device, in hands, below.

Palms cup, thumbs type,
Or click, or ‘Like’, or swipe.

Acceptance measured by affirmation,
But never enough for self-appreciation.

Pressure builds to levels previously unknown,
From always being connected, yet always feeling alone.

~

I’m not sure things have gotten better? I see screens babysitting kids in grocery stores and restaurants. Students struggle to disconnect for the length of a single class. Video games have mastered the arts of keeping attention and feeding brains dopamine at just the right intervals.

No matter how we look at it, screens are time thieves, and we are all having time stolen from us. My concern is that there is a big difference between time and attention stolen from kids and time and attention stolen from adults.

How does AI impact this? I decided to ask AI (Microsoft’s Copilot)… “I wrote this poem six years ago, how has improvements in AI made the challenges and concerns I have in the poem better or worse?” It confirms why I thought it was relevant to share the poem again.

From Copilot:

This is a striking poem because it was written six years ago, yet many of its themes feel even more relevant today. What’s especially interesting is that AI has made some of the problems you identify both better and worse at the same time.

What AI has made worse

“Overstimulated, over stressed”

AI has dramatically increased the volume of content competing for attention. Algorithms can now generate endless feeds of videos, images, articles, and recommendations tailored to individual interests. The result is often more stimulation than ever before, making it harder to disconnect or focus deeply.

“Acceptance measured by affirmation”

Social validation has evolved beyond simple likes and follows. AI systems optimize engagement, often promoting content that generates stronger emotional reactions. This can intensify the feeling that personal worth is tied to metrics, visibility, and online performance.

“Always being connected, yet always feeling alone”

AI companions, chatbots, and synthetic social interactions can provide comfort, but they may also create an illusion of connection that doesn’t fully replace human relationships. In some cases, people spend more time interacting with systems designed to simulate attention rather than building reciprocal relationships.

The constant glow

Your poem focuses on phones, but AI has spread digital engagement into almost every platform. Devices are becoming more effective at capturing attention because they increasingly learn what keeps each person engaged.

What AI has made better

“Anxiety heightened but not addressed”

This may be where AI has helped the most. Six years ago, many people struggling with anxiety had limited access to support outside of friends, family, or professionals. Today, AI can help people:

  • Learn coping techniques.
  • Track moods and habits.
  • Access mental health resources.
  • Talk through worries at any hour.

It’s not a replacement for professional care, but it can make support more accessible.

Reducing loneliness for some people

While AI can contribute to isolation, it can also help people who feel socially disconnected. Individuals who are shy, isolated by geography, disabled, or struggling emotionally may find AI conversations helpful as a bridge toward greater confidence and connection.

Reducing pressure in work and school

Some of the “always connected” stress comes from overwhelming workloads. AI can automate routine tasks, draft communications, summarize information, and reduce cognitive burden. For some people, that creates more room for rest and meaningful activities.

The line that aged most accurately

“Pressure builds to levels previously unknown, From always being connected, yet always feeling alone.”

When you wrote this, “being connected” mostly meant social media, messaging, and smartphones. Today it also means being connected to recommendation systems, AI assistants, algorithmic feeds, and platforms that increasingly anticipate our needs before we express them.

The paradox has deepened: technology is better than ever at responding to us, yet many people still struggle to feel genuinely seen by one another.

My overall take is that your poem was fundamentally about human attention and human validation, not just smartphones. Because of that, it has aged surprisingly well. AI didn’t change the core concern. It amplified it. The technology became more sophisticated, but the question remains the same:

Can tools designed to capture our attention also help us preserve our humanity?

That question feels even more urgent in 2026 than it did when you wrote the poem.

My first phone

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It’s hard to believe that I’ve never owned my own phone. I’ve been an administrator since the mid 2000’s, and the job came with a phone. Before that my wife and I shared a phone… Why would we have needed our own phones?

With the end of the month retirement deadline looming, and a holiday to the interior on our agenda, it was time for me to head to the store and buy a phone in my own name. It’s seems rather odd to be saying that for the first time in 2026. Just think of all the changes that have occurred since I shared a flip phone with my wife.

How different are our lives? How much more focused on our phones are we? How much more do we rely on them for information, banking, entertainment, direction, and of course, communication?

I couldn’t imagine sharing a phone today… I’m having a hard time remembering how I did it 20 years ago!?!

Do not disturb

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For almost a year now I’ve left my phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’ all day. I only ever change it when I’m expecting a call. Other than that it stays muted. I have gone into my settings and set up ‘Allow Notifications’ so that, “Notifications from selected people will be allowed, all others will be silenced.”

This is a game changer for me. My phone is not the distraction it used to be. At home, I still get family notifications. At work my family, bosses, secretaries, and teachers can still get messages through. But everyone else has to wait until I look at my phone. My attention is no longer dictated by other people’s schedules and expectations to communicate with me. I don’t get distracted by spam calls and texts. I check my messages at my convenience not someone else’s.

It’s amazing how this little choice has made me more efficient and less distracted.

Dial tone

When was the last time you heard a dial tone? When was the last time you used a rotary phone? Or a pay phone?

I tend to use Siri a lot. I don’t go to my phone app, I just ask Siri to call the number for me. And I call people a lot less than I text them.

We’ve come a long way from a family phone being connected to our wall, with a long cord attached to the handset. We’ve moved the phone from a side character to the protagonist. From an item to occasionally connect to one person to a tool of constant contact to the world.

Along the way, the idea of the dial tone disappeared. What else has disappeared?

Unexpected positive interactions

I had to make a bit of an embarrassing phone call yesterday. I metaphorically dropped the ball. A parent needed permission to get a student signed up for an online course and had tried to contact me a few times. I never got back to her. She had a similar (but not the same) first name as another parent I was dealing with, and her son wanted a similar (but not the same) course as the other parent’s son. I still mixed them up, thought they were asking about the same issue, and only responded to the latter parent. The error was due to a careless error on my part… 100% my fault.

I remember the day last week when I dealt with the other family, then saw a message from my secretary after the fact and thought, ‘Oh, I just dealt with that’, brushing off the message rather than reading it fully.

Considering the first message from this parent was the week before last, maybe even the week before that, she’d been waiting quite a while. When I called at the end of the day today, I was expecting to speak to an upset person. I introduced myself and immediately apologized for my lack of timely communication.

The response I got was a parent happy to have finally reached me, and she immediately explained the situation. As it turns out, this was a situation that was clear cut and actually didn’t even need my approval. I explained how she could register, and gave the name and number of my secretary to connect with if she had any issues. I followed up with an email, and also let all my secretaries know that this person might call for help today, if she had any registration issues.

Yesterday was a long day of back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings that left me with gaps of under 20 minutes of free time to get things done from 8:20am to almost 4pm. I did have a long and enjoyable lunch meeting in there, but that was also a working lunch, and so I couldn’t even look at my growing inbox the whole day.

Seeing the message about this parent and realizing my mistake was something that made me want to crawl under a rock as I sat at my desk at almost 5pm. But I figured this poor parent had waited long enough and I’d just take the complaint hit on the chin before heading home. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to hear a relieved parent who recognized that I was going to help her son get registered for the course he’d been waiting for.

Interactions like this just want me to pay it forward. I’m left wondering how I can engage with someone else in a more positive way? How can I interact with someone in a better way than they were expecting? How can I provide an unexpected positive interaction with someone when that’s not what they’d expect from me?

Spam call strategy

I don’t know about you, but I almost never pick up a phone call from a number I don’t know. I’d rather listen to a voicemail than listen to spam. However, recently I’ve been trying something new.

I actually do pick up, then I immediately hit the mute button and the speaker button. So far I’ve only had a callback once from someone who was trying to contact me, because the call wasn’t a spam. And one other time I heard a questioning ‘Hello?’ and responded.

Every other call has been silence and then a click to end the call. I think it’s the muting of the call that does the trick. The auto-callers the spammers use waits to hear a greeting to know they have a person online. I don’t get a call back, and I don’t have to listen to the start of a spam message… and hopefully my number is deemed as a bad line, whereas responding and hanging up is confirmation that they have a ‘live one’ to call again.

The call is still an annoyance, but at least it’s less of one and also less rewarding for the spammer.

Battery life

I just got the notification at work that I can update my phone. This comes just in time because my battery has been draining faster and faster, to the point where it didn’t even last until 2pm yesterday before needing to be charged. I seem to be very good at killing batteries. I know I tend to be a heavy user, but yesterday I didn’t use my phone a lot more than any other day, and in fact probably less. I don’t know why, but battery power loss has been a problem with every phone I’ve owned.

I think it’s not just my phone, I think it’s me. My mom has had difficulty wearing battery powered watches for years, they would just stop working after a few days of wearing them. I think I inherited this effect from her. I think there is something about the natural charge of my body’s working that is hard on batteries. Of course it could just be my heavy use or pattern of use that causes batteries to have shorter lives, but I really think there is something about me as well.

I’m somehow the problem. This isn’t a helpful belief, and quite frankly I’d like to be proven wrong… but my phone’s battery health is only down to 86% and yet it’s barely lasting past half a day.

The good news is that an update is coming. That said, this was already a replacement phone since the last update. Why did I need a replacement phone? The battery kept dying. It’s not the phone, it’s me.

Sitting in silence

This afternoon I was emptying the dryer and folding my clothes in silence. This would normally not be anything worth noting but it occurred to me that I really don’t sit in silence much anymore. Cutting the grass, doing the dishes, cooking, doing the laundry, I almost always do these and other chores while listening to a book or a podcast. I fill the quiet with voices coming from my phone/headphones.

Folding my laundry today made me realize that I miss the quiet of thinking without a distraction. Just about the only other time I do this is while writing, and maybe that’s why this thought came to me, and why I’m sharing it now.

Who has time to intentionally sit in silence? Who makes that time for themselves? I think I need to find opportunities to do this, to ‘unplug’ from external thoughts and not just sit in, but be in silence. I wonder if the ever-present smartphone has made some people afraid of the silence of being alone?

Easy distraction

I’m finding my phone to be a painfully easy distraction that’s sucking away too much of my time. I need it to write this post. I need it to meditate. I need it to listen to music while I work out. I need it to listen to my book. These are all legitimate reasons to ‘need’ my phone.

I don’t ‘need’ it beyond that, but it still ends up in my hands, it still takes my attention. It still sucks time out of my day.

I’m realizing that I need to put it down more, tuck it away more, leave it alone more.

Less phone, more life beyond the screen.

Too much

I’ve been on my phone too much lately. Ironic to say as I peck away on my phone’s keyboard typing this. But it’s true.

I’m already an introvert, and so sinking too much time into my phone, beyond writing this, and meditation, makes me a bit antisocial. Cooking dinner? I’m listening to a book. Entertainment, a game or time on TikTok. Comnections on Twitter. Checking investments. Listening to music. Checking email. Checking email some more. Chatting with my siblings. Doing the Wordle when my sisters share their results with me. Googling, watching videos, reading articles and news.

Not all of these are wasting time, but all of these add up to my phone taking too much of my attention. I need to tome it down. I need to be more present. I need to recognize how much this little device pulls me away from the world… and I need to find more balance.