‘Doing phone’ is a stupid phrase. It’s perfect for what we’ve become |
On a recent episode of Galaxy Brain, The Atlantic magazine’s tech culture podcast, the writer Kaitlyn Tiffany used an expression I’d never encountered before, and which immediately struck me as indispensable: “doing phone”. She was talking about the hours of her life that were lost to staring at her phone’s screen, and the slightly dumbfounded realisation that she had spent a significant stretch of time doing nothing but scrolling. “You can kind of sit down and be like, I’m gonna have a cup of coffee and stand up in 10 minutes and go about my day, and then 45 minutes later be like, oh, I was just doing phone. I don’t really know what occurred during that time.”
Doing phone. Something about the outright stupidity of the phrase, its syntactical half-absurdity, perfectly encapsulated the mindlessness of the phenomenon she was invoking. And it seemed to capture, too, my own frequent experiences of emerging from a fugue state of lost time – 20 minutes here, an hour there – into a feeling of bewilderment and mild agitation. What the hell had I been doing with my time? I had, of course, been doing phone.
It’s something I’d been thinking about a lot over the past while, without having quite so resplendently stupid a phrase with which to frame it. I’ve always had a somewhat anxious and neurotic relationship to time. This manifested, in my later childhood and in my early teens, as a near-constant awareness of adult life looming just over the horizon, of the days of my childhood innocence being numbered. (The paradox I wasn’t conscious of at the time, of course, was that this sort of neurotic time-consciousness was........