The Thumb Is Not a Philosopher (Probably)

The first thing I noticed was the sound. Not the videos themselves, which Jai kept low, though now and then a weird, not-quite-human noise leaked out, followed by laughter. What I noticed was the small percussive flick of a thumb on glass, over and over, like someone shuffling a deck that never got dealt. I was at the kitchen counter unloading the dishwasher. He was plopped on the couch a few yards away in our modest condo, wrapped in a blanket, his phone propped against a pillow. The flick went on for the entire length of my unloading the dishes and cooking a quick dinner.

I remember the thought arriving fully formed, with the smugness of something I had not earned: He is not even enjoying it. He's just wasting time.

I had no evidence for that. His face did the thing faces do in front of screens, a kind of pleasant vacancy, the expression of a man waiting for a bus that is also, somehow, the bus. But I decided it was misery, because misery would make my disapproval a form of concern, and concern is so much more flattering than judgment.

That was the first year. I had a theory, and I was proud of it, the way you are proud of a theory you haven't yet had to defend to anyone.

The theory went like this: somewhere back in history, people had time. Aristotle walked around the Lyceum, talking. Socrates stood in the marketplace, annoying people with questions. Their days had gaps in them, and thought grew in the gaps like moss. Then came work, and money, and the long middle stretch of history in which my own generation got busy, and now here was Jai, whose gaps had been filled in with a bottomless supply of other people's three-second lives. And the generation after him would probably be worse. I could picture it: children whose every idle minute was already spoken for, who would never stand at a window with nothing to do, never discover what they thought about anything.

I could trace this version of events to my childhood, to my father stretched out in his easy chair reading the daily paper twice every morning. Front to back, then front to back again. I used to chuckle and say, a little too loudly, "Was that thinking? Maybe not. Maybe he was just hiding behind it."

Lately, on the metro to work, I see the same tableau every morning: a whole car of bowed heads, each lit from below, like a congregation that has agreed on the hymn but not the words. I used to read on that train. I'd like to say it was Dostoevsky. It was mostly the sports page, and mostly to avoid eye contact, which is its own kind of screen.

At work, I watched a colleague eat lunch at her desk with one hand while the other worked her phone. I'd been braced to feel the familiar tug of disapproval, but she looked up and said, unprompted, "I think better when I'm half-distracted. If I sit in silence I just replay the same three worries." She said it cheerfully, the way you might mention that you take your coffee black.

I tried to imagine telling her that she was supposed to stare at a wall and wait for insight, and found I couldn't do it without sounding like a man selling a wall.

It occurred to me that I had been treating "free time" as though it were a single substance, like water, that you either had or didn't. But her free time was a different substance from mine. Mine was quiet, and I filled it with rehearsed arguments and a low hum of self-audit. Hers was noisy, because noise was where her mind actually got somewhere. We had both been using the same two words and meaning nearly opposite rooms.

The mundane moment that changed the weight of things was small. Jai came into the kitchen one evening, holding his phone out toward me with the screen lit, not saying anything. I put down the knife. On the screen was a forty-second video of a stranger's grandmother, in a courtyard somewhere, laughing so hard she had to hold on to a plastic chair.

I watched all of it. Then he took the phone back, and I realized he wasn't showing me a video. It was closer to what other people do when they place a hand on your shoulder. He had no other way of saying this made me feel something and I wanted you to be in it with me.

I stood there with an onion half-chopped and felt the theory shift under me, though not collapse. It just stopped being load-bearing. What I had called shackling might also be the way he held a door open to the rest of the world. He had a sense of what was happening to people in places I couldn't have pointed to on a map. My version of free time had produced a very detailed map of my own head, which I'd been visiting for decades, and I could not honestly say it was the more interesting country.

The second year, I went looking for the Aristotle I'd been so confident about. I read a little, which is how you find out you've been quoting someone's reputation rather than the person. The Lyceum's philosophers apparently did a lot of their thinking while walking, which is to say, while moving and looking at things and being interrupted. The famous leisure, the schole that our word "school" comes from, also turned out to be underwritten by a large number of people who were not at leisure at all, who were cooking and farming and carrying things so that someone else could stand in a garden and have the thought.

I laughed out loud on the metro, a short undignified bark, and a woman across the aisle looked up from her phone with polite alarm.

So the golden age of thinking had been, in part, a golden age of someone else doing the dishes. This did not prove my theory wrong. It just made it harder to say who, in the story, was the one with time on their hands. I thought about how much of my own "time to think" depended on a thermostat I did not maintain, a refrigerator that either restocked itself or didn't, and a salary that arrived whether or not I deserved it. I had inherited a picture of the contemplative life from a culture that had always found a way to hide the cost of it, and I'd put that picture on, like a coat that had been in the family, without checking whose size it was.

Last week I sat in a dentist's waiting room, which is perhaps the last place on earth where phones are the more dignified option. There was a magazine on the table, six months old, with a cover story about attention. I picked up my phone instead. I scrolled for eleven minutes, and I'm aware of the number because there was a clock above the receptionist's head, and I looked up at it with the guilty precision of someone checking a speedometer after a police car goes by.

What I'd been looking at was a video of a man restoring a rusted hand plane, the whole thing in silence, shaving by shaving. And somewhere around minute seven I realized I was thinking. Actually thinking, about my father, and the newspaper, and how I'd never once asked him what he was hiding from, or whether hiding was even the right word for what a man does when he's holding the one quiet thing available to him on a crowded train.

I don't know what to do with that. It would be neat to say the phone had given me something, or that the phone was incidental and the thinking would have come anyway, but I can't certify either claim. The plane came out clean. The receptionist said my name.

Jai still sits on the couch with the blanket and the phone against the pillow, and I still hear the flick. These days I mostly hear it the way you hear rain, as information about the weather rather than a verdict on the sky.

I've started to suspect that every time I called his scrolling a problem, what I was describing was my own fear, dressed up as a historical observation: the fear that I'd mistaken a particular kind of silence for depth, and that the depth might be a trick of how I was raised. The newspaper, my colleague's noise, a stranger's grandmother in a courtyard: they all seemed to be pointing at the same thing from different angles, and I haven't worked out what it is.

Dinner was ready, and we each grabbed a plate and watched TV in silence.