The Last Ten Minutes.....

The Last Ten Minutes…

The blue notification light had not glowed in the last 10 minutes or so. The ten minutes felt like eternity. It was as though the world was standing still. I was juggling between answering a mail, drafting a proposal and running a (mandatory) training video in the background. My brain constantly switched between these tasks. Yet in the milliseconds between these tasks, I glanced anxiously at my phone through the corner of my eyes. There was a tinge of guilt, that I was sucked in to waiting for a notification – yet there were almost an addict’s withdrawal symptoms that craved for it.

Was there nothing happening in the world that was interesting – in the last ten minutes? Surely, someone in my friend circle would have posted on Instagram? He would be vacationing in the middle of the year – while the rest of us slogged full days at office and waited for the weekend, to recoup and get ready for next week’s battles. Or a friend would surely have posted a #throwback picture to a vacation he had months ago – in a wave of endless nostalgia. Either way, that would mean a notification and that chance to hold the tender back cover of the phone that I had not felt in the last 10 minutes.

What about Facebook? No book in print got us hooked as disarmingly as Facebook. And were people silent there too in the last ten minutes? Creating content was passé, we were now into liking and sharing content. Surely, a war must be brewing somewhere? Between conservatives and communists? A social media war between neighbours? Or atleast a hilarious and supposedly harmless dig about Prime Ministers who served tea and played cricket earlier. One stranger from my friend list would surely have liked and shared the video. I could spend a couple of minutes figuring out who he is and then scroll through the content he would have liked and shared in the last couple of months. But no, that stranger friend too seemed to be silent in the last 10 minutes.

Almost anxious about the world’s stunning silence now, I turned to LinkedIn. Well, it was office time. Surely, people would have logged into their professional network?? I have this habit of keeping LinkedIn open for most part of the day. What if that ever elusive job gets posted and I’m not in the top 10% applying for it? My carefully crafted profile with exaggerated glories of past achievements and relentless jargon would go unnoticed. And I’d have to catch the attention of the potential recruiter all over again – for a role I coveted without knowing what exactly it entails. If I knew what it actually meant – why would I apply for it anyways? Well, there were no jobs in the last ten minutes-else I’d have been notified. No recruiter had viewed my profile. There would be no dearth for feed though. With people posting their latest insights and thought leadership. From posting about Toasters in the Cafeteria that taught lessons in “Keeping the Lead Warm” to waiting for the traffic lights to turn green that signalled “Process Orientation” as a key character trait. None of this, however, would warrant the blue notification light that would trigger me to reach out to my phone and check the notifications.

I looked at my colleague sitting next to me. He was busy scrolling away on the phone screen. His laptop had gone on standby. Which meant he was on his phone for atleast five minutes now. And he would have consumed so much information and knowledge in that time. Enough to beat me to a promotion? He would know how the economic slowdown would impact our industry and result in decreased demand from our clients. He might just be coming up with a Plan B to cover up the losses. He would surely present it to the management? Or he would have identified the next latest trend in technology and started applying to those companies before I did? Or he might just be chatting up with that girl in the Marketing department with whom neither of us had managed a direct conversation yet. In which case I had to worry the most.

My self-imposed penance of not touching the phone till the blue notification light flashed was causing me a lot of harm – mentally and materially. And it had taken less than ten minutes for this to happen. Nevertheless, I decided to stick to it. Not by focussing on my work. But by waiting with bated breath for the notification so that I could break the penance and know what’s going on in the World – my World.

The 24-7 news apps seemed to have gone silent too. It was as though the world was taking a holiday from mischief and misbehaviour. What kept the news apps going, what kept the world going and what kept you and me going, was that steady dose of addictive anxiety news sites and apps were injecting us, notification by notification. Creatively crafted click bait articles that ended with an ubiquitous question mark were enough and more to get us hooked. “Recession imminent??” “Countries are going to War…?” “This could happen if your city in nuked….” And these articles, gave us despair and hope every ten minutes, spicing up our lives and giving us a larger vision and a global event to be part of. We were not passive bystanders now. We were actively involved, desperately trying to click, like,  comment and pass the “buck” of opinion to the next equally desperate “Consumer”. The absence of a notification denied me from having the next drop from that eternal trickle of information.

I was slowly discovering how Content had become the “Elixir” for my brain and mind to stay calm and sane. The Content didn’t have to be meaningful. It just had to be there. It just had to be new – slightly new. The same landscape photographed from a new angle, the same news delivered once in a conservative channel and then from a radical tabloid. I would never remember most of the content – let alone use it in my professional discussions or personal banter.

Holding the phone had become muscle memory. And in the moments my hands were not holding the phone, I was almost feeling insecure. The Insecurities of the brain were a different dimension altogether. Holding the Phone - I realised – gave me a sense of control. I was on top of my professional world, my personal world and the World at large. I was in sync with every mail from office, I knew what every stranger in my social World was up to and I would know if my city would be nuked in the next few minutes – though I could hardly do anything about it.

Ten minutes. My phone had engaged me in a who-would-blink-first in the last ten minutes. The  notification light was still elusive. My resolve was weak and anxiety was at its peak. It was easy to end that battle against a non-living object, grab the phone and experience relief wash over me. A saner instinct prevailed and I held myself back. My colleague was still scrolling through his phone for what seemed like an eternity now. I looked at my watch. It had been 10 minutes. Only.

                                                                      

                                                                                                - 7th September 2019