The Sermon You Watched on Your Phone

Gary Turk posted a spoken-word video called Look Up in 2014 and within weeks it had fifty million views—every single one of them watched on the same screens he was urging people to abandon. That irony isn’t a rebuttal. It’s just where the conversation actually lives.

The poem is sincere and a little heavy-handed: put your phone down long enough and you’ll meet the love of your life, rediscover nature, have real conversations, live a fully human existence instead of a curated digital simulation of one. Turk isn’t wrong. He’s also not entirely right. The longing the video taps into—for something accidental, present, unscreened—is the same longing that sends people back to Instagram the moment they feel lonely. The device is simultaneously the cause and the answer to the same emptiness. That’s not a reason to dismiss the problem. It’s a reason the problem is genuinely hard.

What I keep coming back to is that it made me want to put down my phone. And then I watched it twice more.