The Cost Of Living

At least for me, I think it’s fair to say that my phone is now an extension of my body. This is kind of a sad indictment of modern life, and kind of awesome.

I’m essentially a cyborg. I can tell you the time in Dallas, the weather tomorrow, or the distance to North Adelaide from my current location with the same amount of physiological effort as it takes to pick up a rock, detect an expression, or recall a melody.

Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining the physical state of shock my body went into when I dropped my phone and broke the screen. I knew from the moment I picked it up from the footpath that the chip in the glass and the leaking LCD was a serious injury that would not get better on its own. This should have just been annoying. Replacing a phone screen is not cheap, but I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford it every five years or so when this happens. I could understand a gloomy mood overcoming me, or an urge to kick something, but that’s not how I felt. I instantly started to sweat. I felt sick to my stomach. For the rest of the way home my knees felt stiff, my whole body janky and tight. And the whole time my brain was begging me to return to baseline. You can get screens replaced with same day service. If I claim a percentage on my next tax return it’s not even that bad. I’ve thrown away cash just in the past weeks on 4D CTs, haircuts, physios, private health insurance premiums, petrol, stuff at Bunnings that I didn’t want to buy. Money is just money, and a phone is just a phone. Transient and temporary.

All of these thoughts went through my head, but my body refused to concede the point. The other half of my mind started going through counterfactuals - what if I hadn’t pulled it out at that exact moment? What if I had worn different shorts? What if my wrist strength maxed out a more than 29 kg of pressure? It flashed me back to February - what if that bug hadn’t hit my eyeball? What if I had been riding slower? What if I had taken a different route back home on my bike?

Eventually I calmed down. Physically, I was never mentally upset. A Zooper Dooper helped just like it did in February. That sealed it for me, the phone definitely is an extension of my body, and that’s twice this year that I have smacked myself lustily into the footpath on my way home.

This morning my phone had its surgery and I endured the metaphorical general anaesthesia of not having a smartphone. I successfully paid for goods, ate lunch, went to the toilet and wrote some code without a smartphone providing contactless payment, mindless scrolling, word games, and music.

Post-surgery there is now an issue with the fingerprint sensor. That has double-sealed it for me. The phone is not just an extension of me; I am an extension of the phone

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