I am an inveterate walker. Since I stopped long-distance running about a decade ago, I've migrated to long-distance walking. While the Gingham Coast gives me miles of secluded shoreline to wander, there's nothing like walking in New York. Uptown, downtown, east side, west, in my week back so far, I've logged, according to my Apple Watch close to 60 miles.
I like the solitude. I like seeing people. I enjoy the laughter of little children eating soft-serve. The dogs smelling for a place. The chatter of babysitters and construction workers. The pinball mayhem of eight million cars all trying to beat a light. I like the sky and the rainstorms and the world's most-interesting piles of garbage. I like the old architecture, the flyers, the half-town posters. I like, as Poe wrote, the tintinnabulation of the whole jumble. It's like reading Thomas Wolfe and Dylan Thomas and Thomas the Tank Engine all at once. If your brain has a trillion synaptic points, New York fires all ten trillion of them. That's why for all the inherent decay and structural ugliness of the place, there's no more magnetic draw anywhere on our benighted orb.
As we used to say, "If you're not in New York, you're out of town."
Yep. It ain't anywhere else. And nowhere else is even close.
Now, back to advertising.
There's a lot of blather in the ether about living your best life, and work life balance and all that au courant bullshit. There's so much talk and so much captivity.
In short, everyone I see, no matter where I see them or when, seems to be not taking in the world at large--with its horrors and joys. Instead they seem rapt by the world at small. The incessant pixelled pulsations of their phone screen. The endless conversations in order than no one ever again walks alone or no one ever again regards taking a walk, walking the dog, running to the deli as something to do, not something to do while you're multi-cacocphony-ing nine other things.
It's no way to live life.
It's no way to see, feel, breathe, or heaven forfend, think.
There has been, lately, a spate of articles in The New York Times about so-called "grown-ups" recognizing the pernicious effects of constant cellphone usage on their children. Various school districts around the country are measuring the idea of banning cellphones in school. It's talked about as some sort of gulag-esque deprivation like Ivan Denisovitch having to subsist on 2000 calories-a-week.
I see people I'm close to under the thrall of their devices to the point where every moment they live is a moment they're not present in. This seems to be par--or birdie--for the course. The whole world seems to be ignoring the whole world.
I spent the first 36 of my 44 years in advertising never hearing the word culture unless I was working on a yogurt brief. Today it's all the agency business talks about. Culture and the need to be authentic.
But culture, today, and authenticity seem to be about a seclusion from your surroundings and an abnegation of life. We're not living it, we're walking through it staring at something else. I picture a matador solving a Rubik's cube while trying to slay a bull. We don't do either well and our souls are never far from being gored.
I've never had a serious addiction but if I had to lick a phone addiction, I'd start by giving myself a walk around the block, roughly .25 miles everyday without any device. After a month of that, maybe I'd up it to half a mile. Maybe after a year we could train ourselves to spend an hour a day actually being alive.
By the way, the Times just ran a piece that was sent to me by the good graces of my wife. It asks you to look at a single painting for ten minutes. That is, concentrate.
I wonder what would happen if an agency set this in motion. If they talked to people about the world they're missing and how it's fucking up their lives and their livelihood. Mandate you have to check your phone at the door when you arrived at work. Mandate doing one thing well before flitting to the next thing.
It would never work. No one would ever see the message.
Or anything else.
They're too busy.
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