A conversation had while driving with my 14-year-old on Sunday:
Her phone alerts from the passenger's seat
Phone alerts again 5 seconds later
Me: What are those dings?
Aves: It was Life360 telling me you had arrived at yoga. And then it was telling me you had left yoga.
Me: What?
Aves: It's because we passed mommy's yoga studio. It thought you were going there, and then leaving.
Me: Do you like this feature?
Aves: YES!!!
This was a borderline insane exchange.
For those out of the know, or without teenage kids, Life360 is a location app where phones can track, well, locations of different users.
15 years ago, this would have felt crazy dystopian.
But here we are, with my kid's phone sending arrival and departure alerts for places I'm not even going.
When we first got Life360, I felt like I’d entered an Orwellian surveillance state because I started getting texts from my teen like:
"How was getting gas?"
"I see you walking on the bike path."
"What are you getting at the grocery store?"
"Wow, you're driving way fast right now, there’s flames coming off your car icon!"
After that last one, I disabled the part where she could see what I was doing.
It was a bridge much too far.
And mostly, when I think about these phone apps I get a bit bummed. There's something lost when everyone is found instantly. No hiding.
But there's a ton to gain as well.
Back when I was Aves' age, in the Stone Age of the late 90s, Mike Heinzer and I tried to locate Willow Grove Mall.
We were both new in town (having moved there to start junior year) and knew others were hanging out in places like The Gap and Sharper Image. Had-to-be-there social shit.
Short story short: We never made it.
Navigating the 6.4 miles door-to-door was impossible.
Drove in circles. Asked directions. Went wrong to the point of giving up.
A self-own on our own teenage navigational skills?
Probably, but whatever, it happened.
It could never happen again. Obviously.
Fast all-the-way forward to a couple of Saturday nights ago. Point Pleasant Boardwalk with the family, dragged into going on some end-of-summer rides.
Out of nowhere, Aves looks at her phone, yells "Oh my god! Jenna's here!!!" and vaults over the Pirate’s Plunge fence barricade, sprinting off to boardwalk parts unknown.
About a minute later, she's circled back and is now screaming along with another girl, jumping up and down like they were long-lost friends who hadn't seen each other in a lifetime.
Turns out it had only been a few weeks since they met at summer camp.
Becoming insta-friends, maybe the kind you have forever.
But Life360 had alerted a third friend of theirs (who wasn't there) that they were close to each other at that moment on the boardwalk. Like, almost literally right on top of each other. Friends share locations with each other, tracking movements.
Feels weird to me, but for context: I'm an old man.
In this case, it was like a reunion from a cheesy, unrealistic movie where things work out perfectly.
Spent the next hour on rides together. Reliving camp from the top of the Seven Seas.
There are downsides to connectivity, to a constant pull of phones and all the bullshit that comes with them.
But there's insane upside as well.
I struggle to think of all the connections I've missed over the years. All the friends who'd been just a few feet or blocks away, though neither of us would ever have known it.
The price of being overly-connected is steep. But the ability to capitalize on the connections is pretty damn valuable.
There used to be tons of time waiting for someone to show up.
Wondering where the hell people were.
Thinking they might not show up at all.
Now?
It's kind of solved.
And it's weird to think of a world where the missed connections, the ships passing in the night, the "damn, just missed ya's" are largely going the way of the technodinosaur.
There are prices, both small and large, to pay for the convenience. For the can’t-miss opportunities. For the connectivity.
But connectivity counts. And if it means alerts when I arrived and left the yoga studio I never went to, well, then that’s a weird but small price to pay.
(And maybe it kind of counts as me doing yoga.)
Great in Theory
Weekly stories about the gap between knowing better and doing better.
No life hacks, just someone who's still figuring it out, making a couple of changes, and using the rest as material.
For people who know better but do it anyway
It definitely counts as doing yoga.