Funny you should ask

When something goes wrong, self-help coach Tony Robbins advises people to ask themselves a simple question.

What’s great about this problem?

Yes, it sounds counterintuitive and probably a bit corny, but having tried this method myself, I can attest to its effectiveness.

I’ve found that asking myself this question is an improvement over my usual response to challenges, which is to throw up my hands in despair, wail that life sucks, all is lost, and demand to know why does this always happen to me?

But even though I have a fourth-degree black belt in self-pity, I’ve been trying to change my ways.

I finally got around to asking myself that question on Saturday as I started feeling better from this hideous cold that’s been dragging me down for the last week.

I was sitting on my couch, merrily feeding my internet addiction when I came across a meme about Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, Dunkirk and the Batman series with Christian Bale.

The meme claimed that Nolan doesn’t have a smart phone, which I didn’t think was true or even humanly possible.

Well, it turns out that this tidbit was true.

“I'm easily distractible so I don't really want to have access to the internet every time when I'm bored,” he told People magazine. “If I’m generating my material and writing my own scripts, being on a smartphone all day wouldn’t be very useful for me.”

What impressed me about this attitude was that Nolan, who uses a flip phone, freely admits that he is distracted easily, something that I know in my heart is true of me, but I've refused to admit.

‘No sense of self’

That afternoon I watched Bill Maher’s latest New Rules segment, which addressed the same issue.

I have grown to thoroughly dislike Maher over the last few years, but he did make a good point when he talked about the danger of isolation and loneliness and it’s far too easy to isolate with all of today’s various devices.

“Has anything been more misnamed than social media?” he asked, noting how Facebook, Twitter and God knows what else is dragging us away from real contact with people in favor of likes and tweets.

Of course, he went on to irritate me when he talked about the “overreaction” to the Covid pandemic, conveniently neglecting to mention the nearly 7 million deaths worldwide and how New York City was dotted with portable morgues-- or Body Collection Points—because the regular facilities were stacked with corpses.

No matter, I can still extract a lesson from his bloviating and that’s to cut down on the phone. I can finally admit that I, too, am easily distracted.

Of course, this is nothing new to my auntie, who is far more intelligent than Bill Maher and way ahead of him in her disdain for social media. She once declared that “people today have selfies, but no sense of self.”

That line was so good I posted it on Facebook, and I got a ton of likes.

Getting sick sucks, but when I ask myself what’s great about this problem, I can say it does force me to slow down and take a look at my life.

I can see that less scrolling and more reading and writing are in order here. On Saturday, I was watching a documentary on TV. It was 90 minutes, and I went a whole hour before picking up the phone.

That may not be much, but I think it’s a good start.