Infatuated with a Hammer?

Imagine that you are in your backyard, and you notice that your neighbor is building a shed in his backyard. He’s using a hammer and nails to frame the con-struction, and you say, “Looking great Joe!” and he replies, “Thanks” and keeps working.

There’s nothing disconcerting about what I just described. But what if you saw Joe the next day in the grocery store and he is holding his hammer and staring at it the whole time he is shopping? You try to say hello to him, but he is distracted by his hammer.

You see him the next day driving through the neighborhood, and he is holding the steering wheel with one hand and is holding his hammer with the other and is swerving and driving erratically because he keeps looking at his hammer.

The following day you see him in a local restaurant, but he still has his ham-mer, and he hardly ever looks up from it. You’d probably be thinking, Joe has a prob-lem, he needs to get some help, he’s really fixated on that hammer of his and I think he needs professional help.

You probably have already guessed where I am going with this illustration. If you simply replace the hammer with a smartphone, suddenly Joe doesn’t have a problem anymore, it’s how everyone behaves, it’s normal.

The smartphone is a powerful tool and is not inherently evil. Our use of smartphones today often results in unnecessary distractions. The tools are not al-ways the problem, it is how we use them.