In my life, I’ve known a few people who’ve struggled to overcome various personal demons (smokeables, drinkables, snortables).
In fact, I had a college roommate who was so heavily into the sauce that he regularly overslept his 4:00pm classes. (A gifted baseball/softball player, I watched him play center field during one game in which I personally KNOW he was at least 3+ sheets to the wind—and wouldn’t ya know it, with the game on the line, the final play was a high fly to dead center. As he was weaving to position himself under it, my other roommate shouted to him, “Earl! Just catch the middle ball!” Amazingly, he did.)
(BTW: How do you suppose he celebrated afterward?)
While I have concern and empathy for anyone struggling with a chemical addiction, I don’t feel like I have any kind of expertise to help people who are in that kind of mess. Dr. Drew, I defer to you.
But just recently I’ve had two separate conversations with long-time friends, who’ve each told me, “I can no longer escape the fact that am ADDICTED to email/my Blackberry/iPhone/Facebook/Twitter.” And since they know I’m a life-long communications professional, there’s some expectation that I should be able to help, somehow.
So how come in both cases, my best response ended up sounding like, “Yeah, whew…I hear ya. I know a lot of people who’ve fallen into that same pattern. You’re definitely not alone there, pal. And the best thing you can do is…uhhhhhhhh…have you tried…uhhhhhhh…not being so addicted?”
Wow, how weak is that? I sincerely want to be able to help…but I don’t know how. Do you?
So many of my friends, the people I work with, the CEC members I meet around the world, and millions of other Joe Schmoes walking the streets of DC, New York, London, and Sydney seem to be so physiologically tethered to their hand-helds, that they’ve become literally oblivious to the world around them.
Watch people on a plane as you come in for a landing. The second you’re wheels-down, half of ‘em are scrambling for their Blackberries like they’re smoking the last Camel RJ Reynolds will ever roll.
I see people in social settings, meetings and family dinners flat-out ignoring the live humans who are staring them right in the face, because they’re so fixated on updating their Facebook status. (Status: Man, I sure do love pickles!). I saw a guy on the crowded streets of Copenhagen last month come within a centimeter of getting smushed by a taxi because he was texting-while-walking. The taxi driver was probably texting-while-driving.
Seriously, if you were driving down a dark two-lane road at 2:30am, and you could choose who was driving the car in the opposite lane, heading toward you at 50 mph…who would you rather it be: a) some dude who’s texting his girlfriend about how much he misses her…or…b) my old roommate who’s got a fifth of Old Granddad riding shotgun with him in the passenger seat? I’ll take Earl ten times out of ten.
Is there a cure for text/email addiction? Should the Centers for Disease Control be developing some kind of innoculation? Where does the Surgeon General stand on all this? (Hang on a sec, I’ll text him.)
Have you ever helped someone who’s addicted? Have you experienced this kind of addiction yourself? There’s gotta be SOMETHING we can do to help. But what?
on July 22, 2010
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Rick,
I loved your post. This is one of my personal pet peeves and I call my friends who are addicted to their “crackberries,” “crackheads.” I, too, am frequently tempted to check my bb, etc., but there are two key things I try to keep in mind to avoid doing so.
1) I am not indispensable — the world won’t end if I don’t respond instantaneously 24/7. In fact, I’ve found doing so actually promotes bad behavior and unmeetable expectations. People have 15 different ways to reach me if the world is truly ending.
2) I think there is great value in “being present in the moment.” Yes, that sounds like new age babble, but I’ve certainly learned that I hear more, understand more and have more success if I am fully paying attention to the human beings around me and not constantly checking my technology. Making your technology more important than people sends a very negative message to most humans.
The human body needs down time to rejuvenate. I don’t think checking your bb when the plane lands and you’ve been unreachable for several hours is a bad thing (what were we doing with that time before?? nothing.) but if you are putting technology before humans on a regular basis, it might be time to think about how you want to live your life.
on July 23, 2010
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The above described addiction is really turning into a “social disaster”. Where have all the good manners remained?
I actually start getting quite heavy aversion to people in my private environment, even in meetings (it’s exactly those guys playing around on their BB that miss half of the discussion and then end up asking exactly the question one had just discussed….really annoying!) not being able to stop using their electronic devices. But I know it’s difficult to make the difference bewteen what is important and what not, as any message coming in somewhere seems to be the most important.
For myself I actually found an easy way how to handle the different communication channels. Exactly the same as you would use a “communication cascade” for crisis communication, you can also use this in your daily live.
Meaning that communication face to face has always first priority! So as long as you speak to someone right in front or beside you, you should stick to this communication. Once the conversation is finished you may answer your phone-calls. And all the rest, written messages, such as text messages, posts or e-mails can wait ’till you’re on your own and have no one else around you.
And by the way – what can be more interessting than a direct, face to face conversation, where the reactions are real and without those stupid icon-smileys you never know how to interpret, any way?
on July 27, 2010
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I recently saw a great bumper sticker that read:
“HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS.
TEXT WHILE DRIVING IF YOU WANT TO MEET HIM.”
on September 15, 2010
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[...] distraction. After three days you start to relax, sleep better, and lose that nervous twitch of checking your blackberry every 3 seconds. This is probably why the average weekend just doesn’t feel long enough; you get close to [...]
on February 17, 2011
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[...] me wrong. I love an icy cold one as much as the next guy — and that guy happens to be my old college roommate, Earl. But when I analyze how the big beverage companies communicate to the world, it’s [...]