Yesterday, my wife did something that made last night something special. By the end of our evening, our relationship was different. The whole house felt different, and all it took was a phone to go for a swim, somewhere it was not meant to go.
Today’s newsletter is about what happened next, and how it reminded me about the thing that I keep saying matters the most, without ever doing it. Getting back to basics, to do the things we were meant to do. To connect with others and enjoy each others company.
Getting to it (it is a good job she does not read my posts), my wife dropped her phone down the toilet yesterday afternoon, (and before you ask it was before, not after, I am not going to say anything else, please work it out).
There is no elegant way to introduce this as a Newsletter inspiration. One moment it was in her back pocket, the next it was not. It went into a box full of rice and spent the night there, switched off, away from fingers and eyes, with no notifications and its screen dark.
Sat on the sofa that evening, I noticed that there was a very loud space. With no phone to be checked, looked at, or focused on, the present became very real. With it gone, the void needed to be filled. The evening changed its normal direction, conversations went on, where it does not normally go when the phones are accessible. We talked properly, had a conversation with opinions and options, without referring to Google for an answer to settle on a direction quicker.
My wife did not lose her phone last night, she was temporarily without it. It came out of the rice box this morning during breakfast and I have been thinking about this all morning. Once it was free, cleaned and switched on things shifted back to yesterday morning.
My reflection on this was that we did not need the phone to go into the toilet yesterday to find a forgotten connection. The connection was never the phone’s fault, the phone became the blockage. When tired, needing to unwind or requiring a distraction we have replaced decent conversation with a device that we told ourselves we control, rather than needing to control the other person’s views. It was not instant, it was one evening at a time, until the arm of the sofa became the place where the device lived. With it in eye view, over time it became the norm to get the full attention of the person sat beside you, it was something you had to fight or just give up and pick up your own device.
The trade of focus in the modern world has been made without our conscious desire or want. We have added layer upon layer of convenience, needing connectivity, and a noise to blank out the house that should be a home. Not having a real presence, or genuine attention, let alone the human connection, all this has become the things we now have to work at to create a normal life, rather than it being the normal household we once had.
Growing up this caveman did not have a phone on the arm of his rock. He had a fire and the people around it. That had been the same for hundreds of thousands of years, it was enough to hold a tribe together.
The question I have been asking myself today is not whether technology is good or bad. It is this: what have we put in the way of our own human ingenuity, our connection, our clarity, that we did not mean to, and what would happen if we took some of it back?
I write this because I am in a place where I can help others recognise when modern life has changed us and become too stressful to do something about it. That is why I stand in front of audiences, leadership teams and organisations: not because I have all the answers, but because my own experiences, seen through the Caveman lens, gives me something real to offer. Sometimes it takes a phone in a box of rice to make you see what was always obvious.
If you are a Hunter
The Hunter’s version of this is about distraction masquerading as productivity. You are the person who is most likely to have three screens, seventeen tabs open, and a system for managing these systems. You have added layers to each one because it seemed to sharpen the edge, and some of them probably did, but really it is because you got bored and wanted to add something else. But at some point the toolkit started requiring maintenance of its own, and the time you are spending managing your tools is time you are not spending on the hunt. The Back to Basics question for the Hunter is, what would you keep if you could only keep three things? Start there. The caveman who carried exactly what he needed moved faster and hit more accurately than the one who carried everything he owned.
Give yourself permission to get back to basics, the feeling of freedom is amazing.
If you are a Protector
The Protector accumulates complexity in the name of care. Another check-in method, another system to make sure nothing slips through, another process that wraps around the people and things you are responsible for. The intention behind all of this is good, it is always good with a Protector, but the total effect is a version of you that is tired, overstretched, and less present than the people who depend on you actually needs. The phone on the arm of the sofa is the Protector’s particular trap: you keep it there because you want to be available, but available to everyone is sometimes the same as fully present for no one. Protecting your capacity to be genuinely there is the most important protection you can offer.
People can phone you back, when the time is right. Not getting to the phone immediately is not the end of the world.
If you are a Gatherer
The Gatherer has subscribed to sixteen newsletters, bookmarked three hundred articles, and is following enough feeds to stay updated on every development in every field that might one day be relevant. The information is all there. What is also there is a low-level anxiety that you are missing something important somewhere in the pile. The caveman Gatherer was highly selective, because they had to be. You cannot carry everything home from the forest. You chose what was worth keeping and then you left the rest behind. The modern Gatherer can carry everything, digitally, but the carrying creates its own weight. The Back to Basics move is to curate and not to accumulate. Only the information that actually changes how you think is worth keeping, everything else is noise with a good branding.
Cut the crap, get to the point and stop spreading the view, focus on the point and keep it tight. The spare capacity is freedom.
If you are a Healer
The Healer absorbs the world. You can feel the energy in a room before anyone has moved or spoken. You can sense a shift in the message before the words have been spoken. That sensitivity is the most powerful skill a person can bring to a team, or a family, or community. In a world that is noisier and more demanding than any previous generation has had to deal with, it is also a significant drain. The modern world asks the Healer to be sensitive to an enormous number of things while simultaneously dealing with a dozen things through a screen. The cost of being at that level of being switched on is an exhaustion that is impossible to explain to someone who does not ‘feel it’. Simplifying is not being less caring, it is maintaining the conditions your gift needs to function. Putting the phone in another room will protect your signal by reducing the static.
Remove the objects others use that impede your free time, get comfortable with your own thoughts and look after yourself first before sorting other people’s troubles out.
All four Tribal types share the same basic truth my wife’s phone showed me last night. The connection, clarity, the thing that actually works about us as human beings, is never dependent on the layer of convenience we have built around us. It is the basics of what we can fall back on when everything else fails. These are foundations of life we should build on, not replace. The trouble is we have been building for so long that some of us have forgotten what the foundation really looks like.
Go back to basics. Not all the way back. Just far enough to remember what was already there and if you cannot imagine what that looks like, in your mind rent a desert island for a month and picture where you will be with no Wi-Fi or coffee grinders.
If you want to know what Tribe you belong to, take the free Tribal Sorter to find out which personality type you are: https://cavemanprinciples.com/#quiz
If your team has lost the connection or ability to communicate that once functioned so well, or if the wrong noise has got in the way of real conversations, and you are not entirely sure when that happened or how to get back to it, that is exactly the kind of conversation I help organisations understand. Understanding how your people are wired, and giving them a shared language for what they actually need from each other, is the basis of a team that stays connected when everything around them is competing for attention.
Find out more: www.carljones.org
If you would like me to bring this conversation into your next event, meeting or training session, let me know.
Book in for a 15 or 30 min Teams call to find out more about my keynotes here: caveman/discovery
Caveman Thought
The caveman did not sit around the fire wondering whether he was too focused on the people beside him. He did not check his screen to see whether something more interesting was happening somewhere else. He was there, with the tribe, in the moment that was actually happening. The fire, the people, the conversation, there was no need for anything else, the technology was not needed. We never needed to improve on it. We have only found more false-justified ways of moving away from it.
Parting Question
Think about the last time you were fully present with someone, no phone nearby, no notifications pulling at the edge of your eye line, just a conversation and the person in it. How long ago was that? What would it take, just for tonight, to put down whatever is in the way to find out what is already there?
As always, tend your own fire first. It is the one that actually warms the people around you.
Your friend,
Carl – The Caveman.
P.S. When you are ready, here are a few things that might help you;
- You can book me to attend your next event as a Keynote Speaker.
- Want to take a FREE personality test? Check out The Caveman Principles Tribal Sorter.
- Check out my theories – The Caveman Principles and The SLAP Technique
- Grab a copy of my book The Caveman Principles, directly from my printing agent.
- You might want to sign up for one of my eLearning courses to help you master a new skill.
- Or, if you have time and want to schedule a Caveman chat (with virtual coffee) for a discovery call, do it here.