Your iPhone Diminishes Your Humanity. Are You Past Caring About That?

Do you know who Gary Shteyngart is? I did not.

Not until I got to the last page of the mid-July issue of the The New York Times Book Review.   There, an essay by Gary Shteyngart titled “Only Disconnect” poured forth the real life dilemma of our techno-world.  The writing is brilliant. It is a prose poem.

Since sabbaticals and career breaks call on us to “disconnect,” I strongly suggest you read it. Don’t skim. Relish the writing and savor the message.

Mr. Shteyngart’s purchase of an iPhone from a “curly-haired, 20-something Apple Store glam-nerd” described by him below has an undercurrent of uneasy reality and his transformed world likely resembles yours and …. (self-disclosure) mine.

“This right here, is the most important purchase you will ever make in your life.”  He looked at me, trying to gauge whether the holiness of this moment had registered as he passed me the Eucharist with two firm, unblemished hands.  “For real?” I said trying to sound like a teenager….”For real,” he said.  And he was right.  The device came out of the box and my world was transformed.

The perils of connectivity are many including your future kindness, charity, compassion and sympathy.

“With each passing year, scientists estimate that I lose between 6 and 8 percent of my humanity,” Mr Shteyngart writes. “By the first quarter of 2020 you will be able to understand who I am through a set of metrics as simple as those used to measure the torque of the latest-model Audi or the spring of some brave new toaster.”

His annual summertime departure from NYC (he ventures upstate) and the ensuing loss of a cell signal begins the rediscovery that causes Shteyngart to “wake up from the techno-fugue state and remember who I am.”

In sharing Mr. Shteyngart’s talents, I hope to move you off the dime of your current thinking and into taking action – remembering who you are and how you want to live.

Mr.  Shteyngart is a humorist whose novels mix timeless eastern-European dread with a more contemporary sense of absurdity. To help promote his new book, “Super Sad True Love Story” (whose trailer has been  heralded), he recently delivered a one-two punch in the New York Times, first in an interview with Deborah Solomon in the magazine, and then on the back page of the Sunday Book Review with an essay, “Only Disconnect”, about the perils of connectivity.