black friday shopping!

dear world wide web,

Every year, my older cousin Kaitlin and I go shopping the day after Thanksgiving (although not necessarily at 3 a.m.). This tradition is part of what keeps the two of us close. We don't get to see each other very often and this is one of the times that we are guaranteed to be able to talk and catch up. This year, I had a very different experience than my other years.

A week before Thanksgiving, I began reading William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry. In the first chapter, Powers talks about the life of the American being "busy". He talks about how even when we aren't busy, we make ourselves become busy by either taking up a hobby we enjoy, or simply carrying out empty actions. We seem to have lost the ability to live "deeply". Powers compares two different interactions: 1) with a stop sign, 2) with your dog. When we perceive the sign, we react automatically without much thought. When we perceive our dog, we think on a much deeper level and spend more time with the dog. These two experiences are completely different.

While walking around the mall, I noticed this same difference. Here I am, walking with my cousin, talking about what she is going to get her fiance for Christmas. We go into Things Remembered and start looking at money clips. She decides that is what she wants to get and then we spend a good 30 minutes looking at the different ones, imagining which one we could see coming out of his pocket. After laughing about different scenarios in which this would happen, we began thinking of what to get engraved on the item. This took another 15 minutes.

This entire time, I didn't even realize that I had left my phone in the car. I think it's because I was having real interactions with my cousin that I didn't realize I wasn't connected to my phone and 100 other people. I was connected to a person. On the way out of the store a teenage girl walked straight into me. She was on her iPhone, with her friend, who looked the same age, also on her iPhone. This is when Powers' words starting springing up in my head.

As I continued to walk around, I was looking at the people walking next to me, in front of me, behind me. I was awestruck. Almost everybody was either talking or texting on a phone. There was one family (outside the Disney store) that was talking and laughing with each other. This actually began to worry me a little bit.

All of these people were having the experience they have with a stop sign. They would look up occasionally, perceive the store they wanted to go into, look back down at their phones, and walk into the store. Then they would check out some of the prices on the signs, pick up some clothes, and quickly pay for it. I began to ponder what was going on in their brains, what were they thinking about.

For a large majority of the people I was passing, technology, mainly cell phones in this case had them connected to a bunch of other people to whom they were communicating instead of the people standing next to them. All of these people were having very shallow experiences, rather than being in the present.

An hour later, I was rushing my cousin out of the mall because I felt like I was going crazy. I got back into the car, grabbed my cell phone, turned it on silent, threw it in my bag, and did not look at it again until I got home that night.

I know that I do this also, but I am glad that I am beginning to see how extreme it can become and now I purposely lower my connectivity to the rest of my phone book.

I want to live deeply.

Kiersten