Cell phone gone, life gone?
After our author lost his mobile phone in the river in the jungles of Indonesia, he was initially angry and sad. All the good memories – lost! But after days of intense self-reproach, he realized something that suddenly calmed him down.
Gluck, gluck, gone: The author’s mobile phone fell into this river on the Indonesian island of Java
Source: Philipp Laage
Aeverything gone. That was my second thought after dropping my phone in the river. The first thought was: maybe it can still be saved because the water isn’t deep at all and only flows sluggishly. Someone could dive, search and recover the device, then maybe the data could be backed up. I asked the local boatman, but he just gave me a pitying look. Poor confused tourist, his eyes said.
We were traveling in western Java, in the dense jungle of Ujung Kulon National Park, when the day took a tragic turn from my point of view. I sat in the canoe and pulled my camera out of the waterproof bag between my feet. My cell phone, which was on top, fell first on the edge of the boat and then, without me being able to prevent it, into the green-brown stream on which we were sailing through the lonely rainforest.
I soon realized that there was nothing more to be done here. You could stand in the river, but every diver was blind in the murky broth. The sandy soil at the bottom had probably swallowed up the cell phone in an instant and would now treasure it for thousands of years, as an artifact of a civilization that was eventually lost.
For me it felt like a great loss: All the photos, videos and chat histories, all the memories shared with family and friends, all the cheerful and often silly snapshots that testified to my humble existence on this earth – they were gone . I was downright angry, mostly at my own clumsiness.
At the end of the world without a smartphone
We stayed two days in the national park, on a lonely island with tame deer, cheeky monkeys and magnificent monitor lizards. Enough time to blame myself: If only I had synchronized the phone with cloud storage! But stupidly I didn’t do that.
Eventually the anger subsided and back in town new problems awaited me to solve. I needed to check my email for upcoming flights. But I couldn’t get to my mailbox on any other smartphone. Only on a real keyboard could I type the password as if in my sleep without having to remember the exact digits. So I needed a real computer. Which wasn’t easy here, at the end of the world. But at some point it worked, I remembered the password and was able to organize the onward journey.
After that I suddenly became very calm. Almost solved. Because I asked myself: had I actually ever looked at all the photos and data snippets on my cell phone again? No, practically never. Anything that I hadn’t immediately uploaded to the Internet merely clogged up my smartphone as digital by-catch.
There, on Java, I realized that we don’t get anything out of documenting every visit to a café, every sunset with five different photos. And that there is something obsessive about the need to constantly hold onto everything that is not good for us. The brain only stores important memories anyway. The rest is dispensable. We can simply let go of the ballast, including the digital one. Is there a better opportunity for this than a trip?
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