Today as I walked to work it was absolutely pissing it down, as the English would say, it was raining so hard that I was seriously questioning how on earth that amount of water manages to levitate in the sky for so long. It felt like somebody was tipping a bucket of water over me for every step of my forty-five minute journey. Water doesn't bother me really as I have a decent waterproof coat, but I did have to make a choice as to whether I wanted to keep my bag dry (by putting it under my coat) or all of myself dry (because putting the bag under my coat meant my waterproof was touching my clothing, making it wet). I went for the bag option, as it contained my lunch and things for the day, then set off on my watery adventure.
Now as I was walking I wanted to listen to a video on my phone of something interesting, it was an 3 hour interview with a scientist who is an expert on metabolism and how the different things we eat affects the processes in our body. It was very interesting to listen to, he was talking about how if you swap your diet from mostly carbohydrate to mostly fat, with a little protein, it puts your body into a state of ketosis which has great influences on the body and the way we consume energy. From the little I heard of this interview I think it makes our body more efficient at breaking down and using energy.
Anyway because it was raining I kept having to pause and reset my phone because my wet hands were slipping on the touchscreen, as it's an iPhone, and I think that water kept going into the headphone port or something along those lines. Well some water evidently got in somewhere because around ten minutes after I arrived at work, a cloud of water damage swept across the screen of my phone, eventually causing the screen to frazzle and then break completely. Now it doesn't turn on at all. Now I know it was stupid to have tried to use my phone in such a torrential downpour, I am aware of this, but the fact that it is now broken has thrown up a number of issues and questions for me.
Are smartphones even worth it? Of course there is no definitive answer to this because everybody uses theirs differently, but on reflection the amount of time I spend on my iPhone doing absolutely nothing useful greatly outweighs the time that I could look back on and be like : "Yeah, that was time well spent". You can definitely learn things from using them as you have an infinite database of knowledge at your fingertips, but how many of us spend hours watching pointless videos on Youtube or exchanging goofy messages and pictures with our friends? Quite a lot of us I'd say. In a world that is now built for the consumption of digital entertainment, you can hardly expect us all to be effective moderators of how we use this exceptionally absorbing technology.
Also I've now lost all of my pictures on my phone, which is most frustrating. I've also lost a huge list of words that I had learnt, a huge list of books that I wanted to read - and a multitude of different poems and pieces of writing that I hadn't copied into a book or uploaded anywhere. This is where the title of this post came from, because I almost felt like my memories in a way had died in that moment. Although they are part of my past, writing those pieces and taking those, I can't remember them completely so parts of my past and my memory are forever lost into the ether.
I think i'll get a Nokia 3310 and bring a notepad and pen with me in future.
