Against Monitoring the Situation

I fear what may happen when we finally rip the bandage off and smash the phones. I fear the day when we have to bury someone we love and stand on the same ground, under the same sky, looking out at a horizon we had abandoned while our eyes were trained on screens. When that moment comes, what tools will we have left to meet the questions that rush in? What habits of attention, what reserves of meaning, what kind of endurance will remain when distraction is no longer available as our refuge?

We have spent years turning our gaze away from precisely the things that will demand answers from us then. And yet we have mistaken our constant alertness for preparedness. We track political movements, social conflicts, moral panics, religious disputes, all mediated through the phone, and we tell ourselves we are vigilant. We feel responsible. We feel informed. But the vigilance is thin, because it is directed outward, toward endless signals, rather than inward, toward the kind of formation that suffering and loss will require.

Hypervigilance is a moral, spiritual, and psychological disease. Its surface form is the constant monitoring of “the situation”—as though safety, truth, or meaning could be secured by surveillance. I have begun to break free of this by living, little by little, the things I believe rather than allowing them to remain merely conceptual.

We are vigilant about the world of ideas, about debates, about current events—who said what to whom. We are vigilant about debate. We think most intensely about what we do not fully experience; we may smile through tears, but then cling desperately to concepts until our minds break.

Less obvious is that we sometimes even create what we do not yet inhabit—music, philosophy, works of art. To inhabit the world of a philosopher or a historian is to dwell within a reality seen dimly but nonetheless seen and engaged. To do so is to share the world with them in the most literal sense. To inhabit the world of music is likewise to encounter something that already presses upon our shared reality. These worlds vanish the moment we begin to trade works of art like marbles—treating them as objects to be handled rather than as universes to be entered and explored on their own terms.

We may never smash the phones. But the screens will go dark. When they do, what will we see? We will be left with what we have trained ourselves to notice: the weight of bodies, the silence between words, the shape of time as it passes without commentary. The question will not be whether the world still has meaning, but whether we have learned how to remain present long enough to receive it.