The Call Of Existence

To look into the screen of a phone which stares blankly back at you with an almost mockingly deadpan "Insert SIM card" is to look into the eyes of Death itself. I know so because I have gazed into the eyes of Death myself, in a five ton vehicle traveling down a rocky road on an island which has less reception than a badly organized company function.

It plays out almost like a real-to-life adaptation of Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief.

First comes the Denial.

Your rub your eyes in attempt to awaken your consciousness, and perhaps realign your retinas in such a way as to read the dreaded text as something more favorable. This can't be happening to me, 7-11 is obviously the most reputable proprietor of phones! You then proceed to remove and reinsert your SIM card and battery repeatedly, while making a considerable racket tapping and smacking your phone; because we all know that if an electronic appliance fails to work, the best thing to do is to give it a few hard knocks to "shake the machinery into place".

Next comes the Anger.

How could this happen to me! It's not fair, I've been such a responsible text messenger, never using abbreviations and alternating caps locks! You then escalate the phone-tapping and phone-smacking into something which approaches the eventual evisceration of your phone, all the while hurling abuse at the maternal parent of nobody in particular.

Then comes Bargaining.

Oh please let me phone work, I promise I'll stop wasting money on pithy one-liners to the mainland. If you start working, I promise I won't swap you for a htc snap the moment I get back!

Depression then sets in.

You leave your phone in particularly precarious positions, just to watch it clatter to the ground, a twisted, macabre sort of punishment for refusing to work for you. Your head hangs heavy and you reply to questions of "How's your phone?" with guttural grumbles. You make obvious signs of resignation, and retreat into the gloomy swing of a pendulum neck.

In time, you arrive at Acceptance.

You keep your phone in a permanent powered-off state and cease even attempting to detect signs of life from the fallen appliance. Your thoughts get redirected at more pressing concerns, such as the state of the weather and the flight trajectories of wounded butterflies. You eventually accept that your phone is indeed indisputably, irrevocably, very much dead.

But whatever rosy connotations might germinate from acceptance at this stage are but half-truths, for true acceptance only comes about much later. One must first contend with something much more existential in nature: what happens to someone who loses his primary means of communication with the world.

To know that we exist, we merely need to wonder about whether we do, for that, as Descartes maintains, is proof enough. To feel our existence though, is a totally different matter altogether. For to feel that we exist, we need in the least two things.

To feel that we are a member of the club that is our world, we would first be required to absorb its essence, to know its innermost parts. We would need to consume data, collect information and map out its realities. We would need to understand the lay of the land and its residents, so as to be understood in turn. We pore through newspapers and magazines, our senses ever-receptive to the signs of our time, our airwaves always open for the sentiment of the masses. We know that to belong, you have criteria to which you have to conform. To gain membership, to be a part of the whole, you must be acceptable. To be acceptable, you must adapt. To adapt, you must do your research.

Secondly, we need observable signs, roadside indicators which tell us that our presence on this earth has indeed had some sort of effect on the world which would not have happened had we not first occurred. The outward rippling of influence, with ourselves being the epicenter, is one of the most fundamental for feeling as if we exist. That is why we as humans are all obsessed with cause and effect. That is why self-confessed artists decorate trains with coats of color. That is why children build toy towers, only to knock them down moments after. That is why deluded souls send the apexes of aviation nose-first into the crowning glories of construction. We crave the extension of ourselves. We desire the sense of power that gives us. But more importantly, we require that others know we exist.

Interestingly, a close metaphor of our desire to feel existence as humans is the processes of the human body itself. The body first consumes food and drink as sustenance to survive. The nutrients provide it with the means to survive. The waste of the body is then passed out as excrement, a biological catharsis if you will, leaving a distinct, lingering, presence. The creatures of the animal kingdom know this well, and in what is curiously crudely symbolic of the innate desire to make one's presence felt, urinate to mark their territory. And to think we insist our superiority over 'lesser' mammals, when we ourselves carry as base a habit, only now translated into some modern form of social convention.

It really distills down to this dictum:

To feel existence, is to seek to know and be known.

With the loss of the enabler that is your phone, you lose that capability--what more, when you're stuck on an island off the mainland. You lose that connection to the life you had back there. You lose the updates of the state of the going-ons, and the going-ons of the state. You forfeit your influence on that world, and you fear that in your absence, hearts might not grow fonder, but rather, cold as they forget the slowly fading shadow of your presence.

At this juncture, you might perhaps dismiss this as exaggerated romanticism of a purely material issue, where the loss of a phone simply implies the loss of convenience and a tool of efficiency. There is some truth in that. And yet, one cannot deny that chill down your spine you get when you realize that your phone is not on your person.

Steve Jobs is a smart man, for he knows how extremely difficult it is for us to divorce the 'i' from the 'phone'. Consider it an abstract extension of ourselves, where connection with any society is made easy (as Facebook would have it), and where posting our opinions and the minutiae of our day is twit-easy (or, Tweet, as some would spell it).

Somehow or rather, we all possess the ineffable desire to feel our existence.

In the final analysis,

it really distills down to this dictum:

To feel existence, is to seek to know and be known.