Smartphones, Screen Time, and Living Abroad
The most peaceful year of my life was, not surprisingly, after I lost my iPhone 4s.
I had just arrived in Thailand and spent most of my savings getting there. Since I was too broke to buy a replacement, I went out and picked up a burner instead—a cheap Samsung with a seemingly eternal battery life and “Super Jewel Quest” pre-loaded onto the hard drive (coincidentally, it was the only game available on that phone). Those kinds of throwaway phones were available at even the dingiest, most unwelcoming of Thai malls. Mine cost me about 15 dollars, SIM card included. It may have been the best purchase I’ve ever made.
There have been a number of studies produced on the way smartphones affect mental health. Needless to say, a synthetic existence isn’t a healthy way to be, especially for people prone to breakdowns or panic attacks. When I left the US, it wasn’t to advance my career or gain some valuable life experience. I was running away from a job, city, and routines that left me feeling empty. My first year abroad may have been retrograde in some ways—my weird penchant for Day-Glo, my hairstyle, even my writing voice seem puerile in hindsight—low and/or embarrassing moments aside, my personal journey over the past seven years wouldn’t be the same if I’d had a smartphone then.
Without a digital crutch, I spent my free time reading books. I quickly finished the two I had packed in my suitcase, 1Q84 and Crime and Punishment. So I bought a “Thai for beginners” self-study book and practiced the glottal stops and phonemic tones that make learning a language like Thai such a frustrating endeavor. I never really mastered the language, but I did figure out how to read and write it. Those skills have opened more doors than I could’ve imagined. Over the years, I’ve tasted foods that don’t touch many foreign tongues (not always a good thing) and visited destinations that don’t rank as even secondary travel destinations, where English remains an abstract concept. That’s not even mentioning how important they’ve proven to be on an everyday level. E.g., I know when I’m about to illegally park my motorbike, or when I’m being ripped off, only because I can read the language.
More important than picking up a few words and phrases, I learned to communicate in the real world again. I had to call my friends and family if I wanted to stay in touch, because we couldn’t chat on iMessage or WhatsApp or whatever app everyone was using at the time. If I needed to contact friends, coworkers, or employers in Thailand, I had to call them. The prospect of a phone call now sets off my anxiety.
At night, my time was devoted to my girlfriend (now my fiancé, and soon my wife, who was also using a Samsung burner). We would go out to see movies, walk around the neighborhood, and talk with each other over dinner. There was no checking out of conversations, either, no matter how many stories we repeated or how boring they were—we couldn’t hold serious talks with our Thai neighbors; it was just us, two lifelines reaching out for one another in the dark. That’s probably why our relationship has endured. When all you have is each other, you grow close or go nuts. Fortunately, it’s been mostly the former for us.
Whenever I went out alone, I would observe the world around me—and what a fascinating world it was to me then. I lived in local communities that year, first in a university district, Ramkhamhaeng, and then in a rural suburb called Bang Yai, which was surrounded by rice paddies and durian farms and tended to invite curious glances from locals, followed by chats in pidgin languages. In both neighborhoods, I strangely looked forward to doing even the most tedious chores and commutes. Riding the canal boat into the city center might reward me with an image of old men fishing in an unexpected place, some colorful new graffiti, or the juxtaposition of skyscrapers and hovels; a bus ride to work might show me parks I could try to run to later; walking through a market would almost inevitably lead me to t-shirts printed with unintentionally hilarious English. The city seemed boundless, warm, and full of life, so different from where I had come. I wanted to lift the veil and view every inch of it.
Those moments I ventured out by myself often yielded the most revealing conversations with locals, too. When there’s no screen to bury your face in, you talk to people. That has happened with taxi drivers more than anyone else. They meet a lot of foreigners, so their English is usually decent, plus they spend their days inside a car in Bangkok’s notoriously shitty traffic, so I suppose they prefer even stifled conversation to staring out the windshield at a line of vehicles idling on the hot asphalt. I remember one taxi driver explaining to me how he learned English: during the war between the US and Vietnam, he was hired as a cook at a US air force base upcountry, but he picked up English so fast he became a translator.
During commutes, I’d practice my Thai by trying to read road signs or understand what was being said on the radio. Occasionally, while looking out the window, I’d spot something really interesting, like a gang of Thai boys riding their fixed gear bikes around the old town after midnight, a knowing wink a bar girl would flash to her client-to-be, or smile shared between a satay vendor and a security guard heading home after his shift. It wasn’t always rosy. I vividly recall seeing a dead man splayed on the asphalt, his motorbike ripped into bits that were spread across the road like salt thrown on an Indiana highway to melt the ice. Moments like that suggested life in Thailand wasn’t as picturesque as I was seeing it then.
It was only a year. After I earned some money, I bought a new iPhone, and the ever-growing web gradually wrapped its sticky tentacles around me. These days I pass my days behind a computer screen, either writing or looking for editors who want me to write for them, and when I need a break I turn to my phone. It grants me a round-the-clock connectivity that I want to curse. I can respond almost immediately when someone accepts one of my pitches, or wants to assign me a story. In fact, writers and designers are pretty much expected to respond immediately. If you don’t, your assignment gets passed on to someone else. So I check my e-mail before I sleep, when I wake up, and a hundred times in between. I scroll through my twitter feed so frequently I forget where I started, or if I had ever stopped scrolling in the first place. I sleepwalk through the sounds of the city erupting beneath my feet, half-aware that I’m even there, in a polarizing, impenetrable, and beautiful foreign land that captivated me so much I fought to go back to it even when the arc of my life had pointed elsewhere. It’s painful now to drum up memories of the life I led before I logged on again to a world that never logs off. So I don’t.