The Blue Dot
I owned an iPhone for a few years. I know all about the consumer hysteria around it, the calculated need, the way it accumulates. I had enough friends with regular phones to see the distance, and yeah, I’d heard the jokes about Apple disciples. But you use an iPhone for a while and you stop questioning why people get hooked.
I never got a real Apple account, so I scrounged free apps instead. Chic Feed pulled together the best from fashion blogs every morning, even though the photos were terrible and slathered with ads. There was a Dr. Oetker recipe app that suggested meals based on how much time you had and what the occasion was. I never actually cooked anything from it—the real cookbooks were already stacked up, and I prefer holding a book to staring at a screen, especially when your hands are greasy.
Some apps I installed and forgot existed. Shazam. Barcoo for scanning barcodes, which never worked right. Stuff that promised to help but mostly just took up space.
The ones that actually mattered: FM4 for news, Zeit Online for breaking stories, Skype. If you travel, those feel like genuine gifts. Then there was Facebook. Before the iPhone I had some discipline about it—checked once or twice a day. Once the data plan kicked in and notifications arrived every fifteen minutes, I couldn’t stop responding. That same day, at least. It felt like I was paying attention. Over time it just became a need I couldn’t turn off.
The phone doesn’t destroy your attention all at once. It’s subtler. The minute you can be productive every second—checking news, responding to messages, looking something up—the gaps where you’re not doing that start feeling wasted. Standing in line at the store, you think, why not use these two minutes? Why let them just sit there? So you scroll. And you miss the guy behind you putting his beer next to your milk because you’re deep in a stranger’s profile pictures from last semester.
I lost the phone eventually. The reasons don’t matter much. But the loss led to complications, bureaucratic nightmares I still haven’t dealt with, and one of those sent me to a part of the city I’d never been. I’d looked up the route beforehand, checked the map, but stepping off the bus I was completely lost. I’d forgotten how to get anywhere without that blue dot moving toward the red one on a screen.
For years I’d relied on GPS and it erased something basic in me. I started walking, hoping something would click, but nothing did. Then I stopped and asked a stranger for directions.
He gave me a full description. A real conversation. Real attention. And I actually listened, actually absorbed where I was supposed to go, actually saw the streets as I walked. For the first time in years I walked upright through the city. I heard the noise. I saw faces. I noticed I was alive in the place.
It’s funny how the thing that’s supposed to help you find your way can actually lose you. I got where I needed to go. More than that, I found my way back to something I’d almost lost: the ability to look up and actually see.