Yours

October 4th

I love you.

I hope you were ok today. You seemed a bit distracted. I saw you checking your phone lots. I think it was an iphone though so you could have been doing anything. Phones aren’t just for calling and texting anymore.

I hope someone wasn’t bothering you. You know you can just turn your phone off if you don’t want to talk to anyone. You can’t let people force their way into your life.

It’s strange how people feel like a bit of them is missing if they turn off their phone or forget to take it with them. It’s like they’ve cut a bit of their actual body off or something. It’s sad really. It’s not natural at all.

I do have a mobile obviously. Everyone does. I got my first one when I was younger and my mum said I should have one. I used to have to walk half an hour to and from school on my own. My mum said I should have a phone in case there was an emergency.

I never had to call her. Nothing ever happened. I guess when it was winter and it was dark it made her feel better to know I could call her wherever I was.

I think I still have that phone in a drawer somewhere. After a couple of years I got a newer one. That’s the phone I still have now. It does have a camera but it’s not very good. It’s not like those new phones that are as good as normal cameras. It doesn’t play music either. I can’t get on the internet on it. I don’t think so anyway.

I’m not bothered about all that stuff really. I don’t even have Facebook. I had an account once but it annoyed me straight away. It’s just looking at pictures of people I don’t like doing things I don’t care about in places I’m not. Even if I did use something like that I wouldn’t want it on my phone. It’d feel like I couldn’t get away from it. I’d feel like everyone was watching what I was doing all the time.

Once I tried opening up an account with a different name and no photos on it. I thought I’d be able to see what people were doing without having to be me on there. I know that’s all anybody uses it for anyway. Watching other people. The only problem was people have to choose to let you see their page and I was just this anonymous stranger so people didn’t trust me. I ended up deleting that account too.

I want to be free of being tied to anything like that anyway. You have to pay too much attention to keep up to date. If I got a brand new phone today in six months it would already seem really old. There’s no point. Everyone knows that by the time something is out on sale there are already loads more advanced things they’re holding back from us.

I saw a quote online once from a guy who used to work for NASA. He said that normal people wouldn’t believe the technology that’s out there. He said it was fifty years ahead of where normal people are now. If you think about where we were fifty years ago compared to how things are now it’s crazy. It’s that same leap but even bigger again. It means it’s totally pointless to brag about how big your T.V is or what your phone can do or something like that because in no time at all it’ll just be old and useless.

What I mean is that it’s really ok to turn your phone off if someone’s bothering you. You can’t let people get to you all the time. You need to be able to turn people away when you want to.

Maybe in our house we should have a no mobile rule. It’d mean if somebody needed us they would have to call the house phone. Then we can decide together whether we want to answer the phone or not. That way our evenings would be just you and me. We won’t need to take photos of whatever we’re doing to put up on the internet to let everyone else see what we’re up to. Just being together will be enough.

I love you.

Yours,

Andrew