My Battery Is Always Dying
At some point, almost every day, I’ll whip my phone out of my pocket — one of the countless times we all do this within any given one-hour span — and open the screen to an alert that my battery charge has fallen below twenty percent. This triggers the same reaction just about every time: Already? I’ll ask myself. Wasn’t it in the high nineties just a few hours ago?
I recently got a Juul vape stick to head off a creeping return to cigarette smoking, which I quit several years ago. Here, too — even though I only use it every couple days, and typically just for a few minutes on any given day — the battery will die much more quickly than I expect it to.
The Juul battery dies with no warning; it’s working fine, and then the light suddenly blinks red on your next puff and nothing comes out when you exhale. It’s charged with a USB that plugs into the same port as my iPhone charger; there’s only room on the port for one device at a time. Imagine my panic, then, the other night, when I had geared up a baseball game, poured myself a nip of scotch, and reclined in my bedroom chair to discover that both my phone and my Juul were tapped out and in need of a charge.
While our devices have unlocked conveniences that were unfathomable earlier in my lifetime — even within the lifetimes of people who are still young today — our addiction to them has also saddled us with a new dependency: proximity to chargers. We must always take great care never to be stranded out in the world with a dead or dying phone and nothing to charge it with. We carry the cords around with us, we buy portable batteries, we make sure never to stray too far from the resources that keep these sleek boxes illuminated and buzzing and pinging.
In moments of desperation, we may even ask bartenders to let us leave our phones behind the bar to charge on an outlet they may well need for their jobs, putting the devices at risk of damage from splashing liquid and making busy strangers responsible for them. We should be embarrassed to do this, and sometimes we are. But it’s barely in our control.
Those of us who are fortunate enough to have food and shelter all figured out are able to turn our attention to the constant concerns of fulfillment and diversion. Here we drive ourselves crazy in the never-ending quest to achieve that mythical state in which all aspects of our lives are up and running — healthy, cruising on autopilot, fully charged — simultaneously. You toil in career development so that you don’t hate going into work every day, and when you get the job or the promotion that makes it all worth it, the spark in your relationship has started to fade. After you rejuvenate it with couples’ counseling, or move on and start a healthier relationship with someone better suited to you, you start feeling chest pains that remind you of the heart disease that killed your uncle and grandfather. By the time the tests come back negative or the medicine is prescribed, the glory of the promotion has worn off, your boss is annoying you, and you’re right back where you started: dreading the end of your morning commute every day.
While one battery is charging, another is always running dangerously low, and making sure there are always enough chargers and outlets within reach can be exhausting.
Americans are trained to expect, either from the world or from ourselves, across-the-board satisfaction. Even those of us who understand that we’ve got to work for what we want see the absence of conflict and need as life’s end goal. As a result, we chase the destination at the expense of the journey. We assign ourselves the task of pouring water into a long row of punctured cups and never letting any of them fully drain out.
I have friends who have resigned themselves to letting one or two of them go, letting a cup drain out, letting a battery die. By and large, they’re some of the happiest people I know. But I still haven’t quite figured out how to envy them for it.