Stop! Thief!

I recently got a new iPhone 4. It's beautiful. I love it. It's the best phone, and my first smart one. I'm sure that one day soon, my favorite thing about it will be that I have all of the information on the Internet at my fingertips all the time. But it's so new that most of the time it doesn't occur to me that I have all of the information on the Internet at my fingertips. So for now, my favorite thing is that the NPR News app frees me from my former slavery to my local affiliate's soul-defeating weekend schedule. Also, every time I pick the thing up, it's flimsy plastic case, wobbly buttons, and too-ugly-for-words user interface don't remind me what a cheap PoS I'm using. I love life's simple pleasures.

With my books, news, music, movies, and email always available, I tell myself that I can avoid wasting a ton of time. What I didn't expect was just how quickly my bar for "wasted" is changing: already, I listen to the news as I walk the two blocks to the grocery store. I read an ebook while waiting for my wife to fetch her shoes. I catch up on my RSS feeds while I sit on the train. I'm not "rotting my mind" like some TV-watching couch potato; I'm going about my daily business -- and I'm listening to NPR, for God's sake! But the space in my life for ambient thought is draining away, just the same (thanks to John Gruber for the previous link). I may not be making myself dumber with constant exposure to nonsense and dissolution, but I fear I am decreasing my capacity for wisdom by starving myself of opportunities for reflection. I learn; I react; I move on. But I (all of us) have less time than ever to synthesize and to stop and smell the poetry.

From the time we are very young, we have the opportunity to see anything, hear anything, and spend anything at a moment's notice. If we follow all of these impulses, we will soon find ourselves fat, broke, self-indulgent, and utterly trivial. The question is no longer how can I -- you can! It is rather which shall I -- and which shall I not. I can teach my children to answer the first question by showing them the value of hard work, perseverance, and a stable trade. But teaching them the second is much harder: I must teach them self-awareness, self-discipline, and to look always to their values. Those have always been useful, admirable life skills. But with so many modern temptations, and with the line between short-term help and long-term hindrance becoming so very grey, they have never been more important.

There must be a web site out there that can give me some advice about all this stuff. Perhaps I can find it with my iPhone, my precious.