Remember that Chevy truck ad from a few years ago? The guys are driving in rural areas and then pull over; one guy gets out and appears to check for a cell phone signal. He looks at his phone, says “nope” and then gets back in the truck. This happens a few times before they finally arrive at the top of a mountain. The big reveal is that it took them that long to find a spot where there was NO signal.
I would have embedded the video but either WordPress won’t work with this site or the site has its videos locked down. In any case, here’s a link to go watch the commercial if you don’t remember it.
I think this is one of the most insightful commercials of recent vintage. And unasked is the deeper question, something really core to our work here at Live Well. Are these guys in the commercial so weak that they can’t just turn off their phones? That really is the issue in this new world of ours. The signal is so strong and the addiction we have to the mini-computer, the mobile computer is so deep that the only way some people can find to protect themselves is to drive to a remote spot where there is no signal.
So, are they, are we weak? Or maybe, are we trapped? Perhaps the issue is that the powers behind these devices are so good, so devious that they have created a web so insidious, so invisible, that we do not realize how trapped we are. The evidence is everywhere from sleep issues to academic cheating to text-gate for city officials. We think we are more connected. I suppose we are, but we are also trapped in a web that is changing everything about our culture, about how we as humans understand life.
When life becomes something we feel a deep need to escape from, but do not have the personal discipline to simply turn off a device, then we have a big problem.