Addiction of another kind |
There is a moment in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1951 short story The Euphio Question when a roomful of ordinary, decent people sit in suburban contentment while a baby goes unattended and a fire begins to take hold. Nobody rises. Nobody speaks. They are submerged in a signal, broadcast from a device harvesting pure bliss from deep space, and the signal is so complete, so genuinely pleasurable, that the burning house barely registers as a problem worth addressing.I thought of that story recently in an optometrist’s chair, being told I had damaged my own corneas. The culprit was not a space signal. It was a tablet. The slow, patient, entirely voluntary act of staring at a glowing screen for so many unbroken hours that my eyes had forgotten their most basic instruction: blink.
The condition is called Keratitis SPK, Superficial Punctate Keratitis. Tiny erosions across the corneal surface, caused by chronic dryness. My eyes had been watering for months, which I dismissed as tiredness or age. It was neither. It was my corneas doing what Vonnegut’s characters could not, registering damage, sounding an alarm, insisting something was wrong even when the experience felt entirely fine.I left the optometrist, sat in my car, and looked at my phone.
In 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his Apology for Idlers, a provocation aimed at the Victorian cult of productivity. The busy man, he argued, was the impoverished one, rich in appointments, hollow in experience. The idler watching clouds, by contrast, was conducting a deeper education, learning the texture of being alive.........