How Our Phones Makes Us Human

As I landed in Bermuda recently for a winter getaway with my husband, the sun was shining and the water was just as blue as I remembered it from my first trip there twenty years ago.

The plane came to a stop at the end of the runway. And then all 180 of us turned on our phones.

The sound of everyone’s dings, pings, and rings filled the cabin. I looked down at texts from my kids, lots of emails, a missed call (maybe a wrong number – who calls any more?), Twitter notifications, LinkedIn messages, and alerts from being tagged on Facebook and Instagram posts.

Fatigued by all that dopamine and cortisol coursing into my brain in quick succession I looked around the plane—adults, teens, tweens, even some kids—hunched over their little phones, and I thought about the last time I was in Bermuda.

It was 1998. I had recently gotten my first cell phone, a Blackberry. The iPhone wouldn’t be out for another nine years.

My husband Jeff, sitting next to me silently scrolling through his own feeds and messages, was my fiancé back then. He was attending a conference in Bermuda and invited me to come along. Working as an executive recruiter at Russell Reynolds Associates, I had a lot of active projects, and I couldn’t take a vacation. But then I realized I could go to Bermuda and actually work from there.

Imagine!?

I spent my days at the beach, calling and emailing clients and prospects on my new handy device and then went to dinners and other events at the conference. Then Jeff and I had romantic evenings together.

I remember one morning sitting in a cabana overlooking the turquoise sea, feeling productive and plugged into work, even though I was an ocean away. Sipping a lemonade, I actually remembering saying to myself, “Aaaaah. This is the life.”

Cut to twenty years later, sitting on the plane, the twinkling sea just outside of view, but miles away as I turned on my phone and entered my solitary digital universe.

And that’s when I said to myself, “I can’t believe this is my life.”

And I can’t.

And it’s not. Not really.

Over the past several years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what’s changed over the course of my adult life—at work, with technology, in my relationships and the reasons behind it all.

As the digital revolution gathered steam between 1998 and 2018, technology changed virtually every aspect of our lives—how we shop, date, break up, travel, learn, listen to music, work out, parent, walk, and even how we tell time. Who wears a watch anymore?

In the United States alone, we will check our devices over 12 billion times. In one day.

Wow!

You’d think we’d become robots by now.

But no. In fact, quite the opposite is true. We’re becoming more human.

Over the past twenty years I’ve been a workplace strategist, then researcher and author and speaker. During this time, I’ve visited hundreds of companies and spoken with even more founders, CEOs, managers, and employees, looking at ways to improve performance through people.

I’ve watched our culture being transformed by technology. At first it was surprising. And sad. I couldn’t believe people were choosing to call into a conference call from down the hall, and letting their entertainment budgets sit untouched because nobody had time to take a client out to lunch, let alone dinner. Everyone was sitting at their desks, eating alone with headphones on, trying to make it to Inbox Zero.

I thought back to the good old days of meeting up with my colleagues and friends on Monday mornings, chatting about our weekends, or staying at the office late—together—sharing pizza.

Didn’t people know what they were missing?

And then, about ten years ago, not long after the iPhone unleashed a digital tsunami on our shores, I began seeing the word “human” cropping up in headlines, talk titles, and posts. Everywhere I looked: Human this. Human that. “A New Approach for Making Work More Human,” “Why Workplaces are Becoming More Human,” “How to Build a Human Workplace.”

The more “connected” we became virtually, the more disconnected we became personally, which bothered us, inspiring all manner of efforts to become more human.

I call this the Silver Lining Revolution.

Let me break it down:

A recent New York Times article forebodingly titled “A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley” quoted one tech executive who said, “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.” And that’s from someone responsible for creating this devilish technology!

Yes, there are some dangerous forces at play here. Thirty billion dollars lost to stress, six hours a day on our devices, five years of our lives spent on social media. We get it.

But at the same time, the intense pressure of the digital revolution has forced us to see what we miss about the good ol’ pre-digital days, and to bring some of it back. Millennials are demanding meaningful work; as a culture we’re craving authenticity and craftspersonship; mentorships are the new apprenticeships.

Consumers reward CEOs for taking a stand and speaking out. We’re holding everyone’s feet to the fire with ethical work practices, genuine diversity, and enlightened supply chains. It’s slow work, but I feel confident that this demand for fairness, equity, true transparency—honoring relationships—is so important to so many of us that no CEO is safe from human accountability. The headlines are making this clear.

This silver lining revolution comes down to one thing: the more digitized our work becomes, the more we see how important it is to honor relationships. That’s what I’ve learned is the one thing running through this whole “human” business.

So that’s what I decided to do when I landed in Bermuda. I turned off my phone and looked out the window at the brilliant blue sea. I moved a little closer to my husband. I listened to the cabin full of human beings negotiating the terms of their own digital lives. Though I was one of those people plugged in one moment before, how tempting it was to judge, and to worry, forgetting that our humanity isn’t going away.

Just honor relationships, I reminded myself. It’s good for people. It’s great for business. And it just might change the world.