Steve_Bamlett_blog

What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

When I worked as an advisor on anxiety and depression in primary health care, people of all ages would claim that they would never go anywhere without their mobile (and I suppose the same may be said of cell phones in the USA). Sometimes, this was usefully rationalised in terms of concerns for health and safety and often that did in fact seem part of the reason for the separation anxiety consequent on person and phone parting company.

But the causes of staying together between mobile and person always become more complicated as the relationship develops. During the period I was doing this work the powers that be at the Oxford English Dictionary were making a decision to introduce the acronym FOMO (for Fear Of Missing Out) into the Dictionary. Except in self-help books perhaps (of the flimsiest kind), it hasn’t as far as I know, become a category though in the diagnostic and statistical manuals of mental health professions (such as the current DSM-5 of the American Psychiatric Association) but usually they take their time to add them to increase the appearance that the addition is in fact based on statistical data, though it is a very inventive kind of statistics that is referred to in this realm.

And it is this kind of anxiety that seems fostered by social media, especially when our portal to it can be as ubiquitous as mobile phones are. What’s App uses a grey tick for messages sent, two grey ticks for messages received, whilst those two grey ticks turn blue when messages are read. There is room in such coding for much speculation about both the availability and willingness to respond of our correspondent and room therefore for anxiety not only based on guesswork but attributions that seem to circle on the intentions of one’s correspondent towards yourself. But surely those intentions are constructed between the participants rather than just by one of them and can be attributed wrongly by the other person. The point is though, would the same guesswork occur about what is or might be happening in the relationship without constant access to the evidence read as that of being ignored or rejected or belittled.

My feeling is that the presence of social media through a phone is a prompt to speculative fear based very much on one’s own schizoid fears – those in which the self splits and part of itself enacts the worst response we are expecting from someone, anticipates and prophesies our doom, like the ‘ancestral voices prophesying war’ in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan or the voice a friend caught in the act of betraying us. Sometimes, since we can use earphones, the mobile can be the only access we have to external sources of stimulation, except ones we intuit or imagine. They shut one in a singular world in which new experience cannot intrude or even invite one out to another kind of experience, a world wherein we might develop a bit more differently. Instead we are locked in sameness and the expectations on which we ruminate, chewing often very bitter cud.

I remember (I really do) the time before mobile phones – I was born in 1954. Sometimes one was not just available or cut off from those we already knew and knew well. We had to build support systems on the move and as a result we met new people and confronted new experience. There was therefore I think a sense of responsibility for oneself that is perhaps less easily validated these days because less tested in practice. Since it is so easy to call in the emotional cavalry, at least online or by telephone, we might do so and stay that bit more dependent or co-dependent on those sometimes tired-out resources. We lose the ability to strengthen muscles that develop trust between friends, lovers or partners and perhaps this is deleterious to those relationships. We may too soon get news that has not been checked from a wider sphere still and be the more subject to misrepresentations based on biased or thoughtless accounts of occurrences.

But it strikes me that we may already be trapped by our current age and its’ conveniences’! Dare we ever turn off our mobile phones and ‘be’ what we are as a reflection of what we move into – which is after all a much truer mobility? Dare we? I have found myself I have to say becoming irritated with people who do this (when I can’t reach them and feel I must IMMEDIATELY. Hence, the signs are not good for me. Moreover, we can only think the idea of abandoning the mobile in terms of the dis-invention of not only appliances, like the phones themselves and ear microphones, but of habitual behaviours built around those appliances – ones that sometimes lead to genuine panic attack if we feel our phone is lost, mislaid or stolen (and have you noticed how some people always invoke ‘stolen’ as the first explanation). Of course we may lose our access to a calculator or a news channel or Kindle and have to relearns skills in mental arithmetic and filling our time without access on tap to news and entertainment. But would that be a bad thing either.

So I would like NOT to say that one thing I always carry with me was my mobile phone – but, to be frank, I would I think be lying if I did. The world, as they say, is too much with us.

Love

Steve