‘I did not know guilt until I had a smartphone’

I didn't know what guilt was until I had children. Well, that's what I used to think, but it's not actually true. In fact, I did not know guilt until I had a smartphone.

I had never really experienced what John Calvin called “the torture of a bad conscience, the hell of a living soul” until I acquired the pinging, pulsating, chiding, vibrating, ever-present, never-mollified nag in my pocket.

Imagine if, 10 years ago, someone had come along, thrust a phone at you, and said: “Take this box made of aluminosilicate glass, flame-resistant plastic and silicon. Soon you’re going to fall so deeply in thrall to it that, for the rest of your life, you’ll voluntary keep it within arm’s reach. You’ll wake up in the middle of the night, and rather than reach out to your partner, you’ll reach for it instead.

The iPhone's principal achievement has been in ushering in a decade of constant, low-level guilt

“You’ll gaze at it when you should be gazing across the dinner table at your loved ones. You’ll fixate on its glassy surface instead of into the eyes of your newborn child. And it will repay your devotion with a constant, restless guilt, interspersed with stabbing rushes of anxiety, shot through with a lingering fear of missing out.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I don’t think there would be a stampede to sign up.

My epitaph

The very first email I sent, in 2005 from my new Gmail account, began: “Hey doll, Sorry it’s late. (Reckon that’ll be my epitaph!)” I read it now and shudder – not just at the “doll” (who did I think I was, Frank Sinatra?) but at the foreshadowing of the decade of grovelling apologies to come.

Back then, in the halcyon days before the iPhone, entire months would go by without me saying sorry to anyone. Then the iPhone arrived, with its promise of seamless communication and instant responses, and slashed the acceptable email response time from 10 days to under two hours.

We're all grown-ups tending to our Tamagotchis, terrified that if we let an email go unanswered or a Facebook post unliked, somewhere a cute little alien will curl up and die

As its 10th birthday approaches in June, I expect acres of commentary will be given over to assessing the way it changed the nature of computing, or made technology a fashion statement. Forget all that: the iPhone’s principal achievement has been in ushering in a decade of constant, low-level guilt.

Sorry it’s taken me so long to write this. I spotted your message while I was in the middle of something else and . . . Sorry for hassling you. Sorry this is a bit late. Sorry I can’t be more accommodating. Sorry I didn’t get back sooner. Oops, sorry. Sry 4 l8 reply.

The fact of the matter – the data of the matter – is that I have used the word “sorry” 2,629 times in the 11.5 years since I set up my Gmail account. That’s roughly once every 1.6 days, not including all the apologies texted, sent by direct message or muttered on busy streets. It doesn’t include the painful occasions that I have had to look someone in the eye and say the word aloud.

Gross concept

About a decade before the iPhone, there appeared a piece of technology that, looking back, paved the way for it, an innovation so cunning it won its creator the Nobel prize for economics. Anyone remember the Tamagotchi? These pebble-sized plastic digital pets needed to be fed, toilet-trained and tended to when they were sick. Stop clicking and they would curl up and die, introducing their young owners to the concept of gross negligence manslaughter.

Keeping your Tamagotchi alive became an all-consuming craze. Schools banned them. Parents fretted their kids were turning into zombies. Eventually the kids themselves realised that constantly tending to the whims of a lump of beeping plastic was a colossal pain. So they solved the problem by taking the batteries out and flung the Tamagotchis into the toy basket, where many remain to this day.

What do you want to be known for? Your speedy email responses, or the sincerity with which you apologised for the lack of them?

Two decades later, those same kids are desperately trying to nurture their 604 Facebook relationships, their 36 Whatsapp groups, their 5,723 unanswered emails, and their 2,248 Twitter followers. We’re all grown-ups tending to our Tamagotchis, terrified that if we let an email go unanswered or a Facebook post unliked, somewhere a cute little alien will curl up and die.

A friend of mine, a talented writer and phenomenally productive person, recently shared an essay on Facebook by the writer Melissa Febos. The headline reads: “Do you want to be known for your writing, or your swift email responses?” Substitute anything else for “writing” – baking, football, friendship, bricklaying, accounting, parenting, horticulture – and the question stands.

Sincerely yours

What do you want to be known for? Your speedy email responses, or the sincerity with which you apologised for the lack of them? I thought not. Did any one of my 2,629 sorries make a blind bit of difference to the person the receiving end? Maybe five of them did. Ten at a push. The rest were about as meaningful as a Tamagotchi wedding.

So from now I’m going to use “sorry” less and “thank you” more. I’m going to accept the emails I can’t answer and answer the ones I can. First, though, I’ve got some emails to write.

I know. Sorry.

joconnell@irishtimes.com