From Luxury to Necessity and Then What?

Getting rid of our landline was one of the most liberating, yet disorienting things, and then it became a necessity. No more was there a limited location for connecting to the umbilical cord of modern society. With a cell phone, you’re always attached. But it’s not my fault…

The world is making me do this. To hunt on a Texas Wildlife Management Area they want me to sign in and out by….smartphone. To hunt on Balcones National Wildlife Refuge (with a drawn tag), they want me to take a picture of coordinates with my smartphone. Restaurants want me to access – I even hate that language – their menus by the “mark of the beast” the QR code. How? By my smartphone. The ENT, dentist, pharmacy, auto dealerships (!) want me to meet them on my smartphone. Don’t even get me started with travel, lodging, or navigating.

I really only took the plunge – surely as shocking as any Nestea Plunge advertised[i] – because I couldn’t download audiobooks any more to my PC and put them on my MP3 player (Hey, I’m getting the hang of tech talk, aren’t I?). I had to have a smartphone to do it now. I have one of my son’s old ones, but without the sim card. It works beautifully.[ii]

What really got me to switch was one of my sons saying, “You know Dad you’re spending far more time and energy avoiding smartphone technology than you would ever use to use it. (Wise grasshopper that one.)

When we were looking at homes in 1999, our realtor told us not to pay extra for a fireplace because people generally use them for the first year and then very sporadically after that. What they really get out of a fireplace is an extra maintenance point. She was spot-on. Walking through the 200 new homes that is my neighborhood, my sense of smell told me that is exactly what happened.

If I’m clear here, you’ll get the analogy when I say the fireplace has travelled the opposite trajectory of the smartphone. The fireplace started out as a necessity and is now a luxury. TV and movies “teach” me the bigger the fireplace the more the luxury. Watch the TV series Alone, or any other survival show, having a place for a fire is a sine qua non of surviving. That’s how it was on the American frontier – really any frontier – but now you can take or leave a fireplace.

Cellphones started out a luxury. You’ve seen the big bricks, the phones that look like WW II walkie-talkies (The journalists who coined this term ”walkie-talkies” circa 1939 deserves an award for clarity and conciseness (https://www.twoway-radio.co.uk/history-of-walkie-talkies.)), but bow they’re paired down to the size of a watch. But the real leap – forward? – is the computer that used to take a room, then a desk, then a lap, is now on your person.

You can tell a lot about a culture by not what it considers a necessity but what actually is a necessity to live in it. Over 20 years ago, a son went away to college with a prepaid phone at my expense (very limited) and came back soon with a smartphone at his. He asked me, who went to college in the 70s, “How did you do it? Arrange to meet with people, communicate, know where anyone was without one?” You can’t miss what you never had or even knew about, but once you know about it, and even more, once it becomes a necessity to live in your culture, you are going to adopt it. Perhaps it is clearer to say, you’re going to adapt to it.

Everyone shapes their reality according to the options they have, and when an option becomes a necessity something has changed, and not necessarily for the good, or better, let alone best.

[i] Nestea Plunge Commercial (1977), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOPCYQBDLmk

[ii] As an aside, I then began to resent every single one of you techies for steering me away from Apple and iPhones. As soon as I saw the connector which unlike Microsoft intuitively plugs in I was hooked. No gymnastics required. No IQ test of which shapes are alike. I was to the point of removing you from my “Christmas Card List” when I noticed that Apple had changed that connection. Back to Apple being as sour as ever.

 

About Paul Harris

Pastor Harris retired from congregational ministry after 40 years in office on 31 December 2023. He is now devoting himself to being a husband, father, and grandfather. He still thinks cenobitic monasticism is overrated and cave dwelling under.
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