Making a thing useful

I prefer my phone without a case. Tragic circumstances notwithstanding.

I’ve had a lot of phones at this point. But I got my first smartphone sometime around 2013. Before that I loved to carry around the iPod Touch. I’ve had one or the other in my pocket since 2010. For the five or so years before that I carried around a flip phone or indestructible Nokia.

So for 15 years I’ve chosen to have a device that’s all screen and remarkably fragile.

Mostly it’s been fine.

I’ve cracked the backs, scratched the sides and front, but don’t remember ever fullly destroying the front glass. Each device has remained usable throughout its life cycle.

A funny thing happens though, when I first pull these magical slabs out of their boxes. They’re prestine and perfect, and contain all the possibilities of what I might do with them. They’re also not utilitarian—yet. They represent something too nice to handle, to use, to make into a tool.

But something inevitably happens after a few days or weeks of usage. This is probably now because I don’t use a case or screen protector. It’s subtle—again I’m quite careful with my devices. At some point it happens, usually when I’m outside and looking at my screen in the harsh light of the sun. I look down and see a scratch or two across the glass.

Instead of getting worried about it—as I used to do when I meticulously applied screen protectors and fretted over ever bubble, crease, and potential minute scratch—now I smile to myself.

The thing has its first scratch, and now it can truly be a tool.

That doesn’t mean I want to just bang up my phones. I’m still quite careful with them. They go in a pocket or on a hard surface (screen facing up but persistently turned off). I don’t just throw my phones around. But still, at this point small scratches will occur, and the device will start to show its age. After a few years I’ll replace it.

If the first days and weeks are the break-in period, where I’m most uncertain about this new thing, the next year or two is the useful time where it sees some wear, but becomes a daily driver.

When the device hardware fades into the background, gaining character over time, then I’m able to just appreciate what I can do with it, and worry less about pristine perfection.