I am currently living a year without a smartphone. At the end of 2018, I pledged that I would spend all of 2019 without using my iPhone, or any other digital device with cellular service.
It’s coming close to November now, and I have held true to the pledge… for the most part. There have been a couple of times when I’ve been with someone who received a phone call on their iPhone, and handed the device to me. I took the call. This month, for a couple of days, I used an iPhone with a deactivated cellular connection as a camera and audio recording device for a professional project. Other than that, I’ve been free of mobile digital technology this year.
This week, however, I was tempted. Billboards featuring the new iPhone 11 Pro seem to be everywhere, with their triple lenses staring at me, enticing me with dreams of beautiful pictures to document my days. As I’m getting back into running, the thought of using Runkeeper again has been lingering in my mind, making the exercise seem somehow more official.
I took it as far this week as to go into a Best Buy store and talk with a clerk there about the new iPhones… just to get information, I told myself. The truth was that I felt the strong temptation to go ahead and buy one, just thinking of all things I could do with it.
I didn’t follow through, and I suppose I’m glad I didn’t. I’m still smartphone free, but the temptation is still with me.
Temptation is a whispering emotion. It makes subtle suggestions, but it does so relentlessly, dropping hints so thickly that they become impossible to ignore. It’s a feeling of weak resolve that mocks our pretense of firm determination, and worst of all, does it from within our own minds.
“I can resist anything except temptation,” Oscar Wilde quipped. The comment survives in our memories not just because it was witty, but because it’s something we’ve all felt. It’s easy to make strong declarations of moral principle and absolute, steadfast decisions, but much harder to keep them.
Temptation is insidious because it’s a reminder that we don’t have just one true character. We don’t want just one thing. As Walt Whitman observed, we contain multitudes. Our minds are sort of like the multiplying cameras on the back of the iPhone, only we have many more than just three lenses.
Traditional Christianity externalizes temptation, imagining that it’s demonic spirits who are whispering in our ears, leading us astray, but the truth is that it’s almost never other people who lead us off the straight and narrow paths we design for our lives. We tempt ourselves.
The emotion of temptation is not just an urge to disobey our own rules for lives. Temptation is a reminder that, while we want to follow those rules, we also hate them. Temptation is the experience of multiple aspects of the self. Underneath the mask of certainty, we really haven’t made our minds up, because our minds are always being remade. To give in to temptation is to liberate ourselves, or at least, a part of ourselves.
Temptation is the voice of flexibility against the rigid singularity of purpose that we praise in the abstract as discipline, but rebel against nonetheless, not because we are weak, but because the desire to escape our inner totalitarian is strong.
It was with this in mind that Mark Twain is said to have commented, “There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.”
Perhaps some day I will have the strength of character to give in to the temptation to hold and own an iPhone again. For now, it’s fear of my own desire for the technology that keeps me from it.
