“what if phones, but too much” — Mallory Ortberg on the premise of Black Mirror

That joke is hilarious, and it describes a lot of sci-fi. It also evokes the unease that keeps popping up regarding how much time we spend glued to tiny screens. Personally, I love my tiny screen. But I can understand the anxiety. What if all the notifications fracture our attention spans? What if we can never fully concentrate again? (These worries are overblown but not entirely unfounded.)

Photo by Jake Stimpson.

The idea of “what if x, but too much” is that we don’t know what we want. To be more precise, we know what we want, but not what we need. Or maybe we know what we want, but not what we’ll actually enjoy. Want / need / enjoy are all different criteria, and it’s difficult to succeed based on every metric.