فصل 38

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Talking about getting a tattoo was, I realized, a perfect case of life being about the journey and not the destination. And I felt relieved to have saved myself from reaching my destination with a lot of tattoos on my upper butt area that I’d then changed my mind about.

One of the best things about Old Lady Jackson is that when you don’t take her advice (Miles and Mae have approximately seven thousand piercings between them, and exactly 152 tattoos each), it’s fine with me! She’s no fun, but I still am!

Old Lady Jackson is concerned about you in other ways too, but I think you’re doing great! OLJ is (obviously overly) worried about things like that dating app that wants you to have your location services on all the time (how is that possibly safe?) and the fact that all you ate yesterday were liquids that came in mason jars from that juice place on the corner (really? No solid foods at all?). OLJ doesn’t love it when that guy texts you at eleven o’clock on a Friday night after you haven’t heard from him all week and wants you to “hang out,” and you do. She’s worried that you aren’t being treated as well as you deserve, and while she understands that “things are different now,” surely there have to still be people out there with better manners and an ability to make plans with you at least a day or two ahead of time?

Old Lady Jackson is also very worried about the alarming number of young people she’s heard are being prescribed Adderall so that they can “focus better at school or work.” In OLJ’s day, they called the feeling of not wanting to sit in the library for hours the “feeling of not wanting to sit in the library for hours.” And it wasn’t considered a medical condition to be bored or distracted at work; it was just part of the reality of work.

A while ago I saw a young family in the airport, a couple with their young toddler, who was happily sitting in her carrying chair thing. All three were looking down, scrolling through their phones with glassy eyes, not speaking to one another. We see this a lot, of course, but this was the first time it really occurred to me how different things are now than when I grew up. I didn’t have a mobile phone until I was in my late twenties. My fourteen-year-old godson just got one not too long ago. But the next generation, like this baby in the airport, will never know what life is like without a device. This raises a couple of questions: What does the future hold for this baby? And can she already beat me at Candy Crush?

We can all agree that airports are the worst, and a tough place to entertain a fussing baby. And presumably the parents were doing something important and would return their attention to each other and their baby in a moment. Probably the baby was sitting there learning to speak Mandarin or monitoring her stock portfolio. Even so, there’s a checked-out, drugged sort of look we get when on our phones that’s different from the look we get when reading a book, or even just staring into space. I get that look too, and when I catch my own reflection, it gives me a chill. It’s like Gollum’s face just before he drops his Precious in the water.

The people I know who use social media and dating apps do so because they’re trying to connect, stay in touch, and in some cases find someone to go out with or maybe even to fall in love and start a family with. In fact, this family in the airport was quite possibly formed by these advances in technology, and now, thanks to the wondrous connectivity to which we all have access, they had finally achieved their dream of finding each other—but they were still sitting in the airport scrolling through their phones. And this is just the beginning. Where will we go from here?

When my sister meets her work friends for dinner—a group of super-high-level New York business types—they sometimes do the following: everyone places their cellphone in the center of the dinner table, and the first one who can’t take it anymore and goes to reach for their phone has to pay the bill. Fun! When I’m driving somewhere, I’ve started to put my purse in the trunk of the car to prevent myself from checking my phone at a stoplight. I think games like this are necessary until we figure out how else to resist the temptation to click on important breaking news stories while driving, like “Ten Cats with Surprisingly Human Faces!”

Or rather, I think it’s all probably fine! Let’s make a date to see each other and then spend twenty minutes scrolling through hundreds of photos looking for that one we just can’t find! Let’s not wonder about one single solitary thing when we can just Google it over appetizers! Let’s leave our phones out on the table “in case of emergency,” but respond to all the non-emergency texts anyway! It’s just what people do! I’m totally okay with it! It’s that crazy Old Lady Jackson who thinks it’s weird, and she wrote you a letter on actual paper to give you her thoughts: