The Private Collective

Sitting in a small, fifth-story Melbourne flat, Mum receives a message from Claire, one of many childhood friends with whom she's still in touch. Using her mobile phone's network messaging service, not WhatsApp, not Facebook, Claire sends Mum a message saying she's sitting outside the ICU, waiting to see her husband of forty years, George. George just came out of open-heart surgery.

After reading Claire's message, Mum, holding her Samsung in her left hand, uses her right index finger to type, letter by letter, "Oh darling. So glad you and he are OK," followed by emojis of hugs, kisses, and love hearts. Mum's index finger floats over the paper airplane symbol, thrice hesitating to send before deciding to add, "Thinking of you and George xxx," before pressing the button.

Bearing witness to heartwarming moments such as these, the ease with which love and care can be shared in times of greatest need, when you're thousands of miles apart, it is impossible to argue that the mass adoption of mobile phones is a bad thing.

But the phone itself isn't really what interests me. It's what the phone reveals. The longer I think about it, the more I suspect that almost everything important in modern life contains this exact same tension.

If pressed, I would have to say I dislike mobile phones more than I like them. I despise the way people obnoxiously use them loudly in public, how they interrupt face-to-face conversations, and how they have conditioned the modern human to automatically look at a glass screen upon hearing a notification bell. But I love being able to call home whenever I want. It's a spectrum; it's not black or white.

Within that spectrum lies ambivalence, and the recognition of ambivalence is virtuous.

Seeing the inherent complexity of things forces us to open our minds, to truly and deeply weigh all available information before rushing to judgment. But just as the benefits of the mobile phone are felt on a small, deeply personal level, yet in public ruin human interaction, this kind of nuance seems to be the exclusive privilege of the individual, not the collective.

Human groups, starting with the family and expanding to corporate boardrooms, political parties, and religious institutions, all stand on common ground. They are historically united by solid, unambiguous principles that declare this is right and this is wrong.

Political leaders, military commanders, and corporate executives cannot afford to be ambivalent. A leader paralyzed by nuance is a leader who cannot command; collective action requires a flag to march under, not a philosophical debate.

Yet, our devices have created a bizarre paradox: they force the private individual to act like a public collective. Every day, the digital world exposes us to more complexity and tragedy than the human brain was ever wired to process, making any thoughtful person increasingly ambivalent. At the exact same time, the platforms demand that we project absolute certainty, instantly taking a loud, unambiguous stance on every global event, every complex economic shift, and every headline flashing across our screens.

The consequence is a quiet internal fracturing. The more of the world I see through this glass pane, the more ambivalent I become. With this creeping sense of doubt, I find myself questioning long-held certainties, asking: Where did this perspective come from anyway? Why do I even have an opinion on this subject?

The longer I sit with these questions, the more I realize that many of the things I thought I held an important, well-informed opinion on either aren't well-informed at all, or don't have the slightest bearing on my day-to-day existence.

Ultimately, having a loud opinion on anything and everything matters far less than the quality and relevance of what we choose to care about. We have been conditioned to give away our focus to every algorithmic outrage, but human attention is a finite currency. Before we let a device dictate our mental energy, we have to ask the only questions that actually matter: Is this a cause that's worth spending a life on? Is this time well spent?

When it comes down to it, time is one of the only absolute truths we have, and it's constantly chasing us down. The ultimate test of the technology in our pockets is not whether it makes us smarter, or more plugged into global discourse, or more certain of our politics.

The test is whether it helps us spend our limited, ticking time on the few people who actually matter most. Not out in the digital void of collective noise, but right there, in a fifth-story flat, in the distant company of an old friend.