When Losing Your Smartphone Triggers the Five Stages of Grief

Описание: Donnie Madia is riding down an elevator in a hotel. A young man—22, maybe 23—is standing there holding three devices: a smartphone with a supercharger (thick as a brick), an iPad Pro, and a MacBook Air. Carrying them like textbooks fresh out of school.

Madia thinks to himself: How busy can he really be?

But Madia knows the answer. Because he's that guy too.

He gets 100, 250 emails a day. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty text messages. He manages twelve Instagram accounts—eight of them are his son posting pictures of his Adidas next to Madia's dress shoes. He can barely manage the barrage. And he's not the busiest person in the room. There are busier men and women here who somehow pull it off.

But here's the problem: Being connected is a disconnect.

His wife, Estelle, taught him that. She's told him maybe ten, fifteen, twenty times: "Can you be present?"

And Madia would say, "Yeah, I am present. I'm right here."

And she'd say, "No, you're not."

She's beautiful. She's smart. And she manages his posture—literally. She'll take a photograph of him hunched over his phone and save it for later that night when he comes home from work. She'll say, "Take a look at that. You like that? That's how you look."

Because Madia spends his days like this: head down, shoulders curved, face glowing blue from the screen.

How'd you like to do that all day?