Michael Finkel Quotes

You look out on the street, and everyone has their heads in their phones. Nobody's really looking up at the sky or the buildings and taking the day in. I try to be conscious of it, but everybody falls prey to it.

Technology is notorious for engrossing people so much that they don't always focus on balance and enjoy life at the same time.

The moment of drifting into thought has been so clipped by modern technology. Our lives are filled with distraction with smartphones and all the rest. People are so locked into not being present.

I'm always wondering: Have all these time-saving devices actually saved us any time, or have they just created a million fetishes and obsessions that keep us from the quiet half hour we should be taking to sit and do nothing every day?

If you're constantly stimulated by being called away to the buzzing and the excitement of what's on your phone, solitude seems kind of scary.

There are plenty of reasons to put our cellphones down now and then, not least the fact that incessantly checking them takes us out of the present moment and disrupts family dinners around the globe.

Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations, emails, relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place: ourselves.

Nowadays we have so many things that take our attention - phones, Internet - and perhaps we need to disconnect from those and focus on the immediate world around us and the people that are actually present.

These days, unplugged places are getting hard to find.

Almost every time I go to the ocean, I think about throwing my phone right into it. Sometimes, you pull that thing out of your pocket, you look at it, and you're like, 'What was I just going to do with this? Was I going to take a note? Was I going to check my email? Was I going to take a picture?'

I'll go out to eat and have a really good lunch and try to shut the phone off, but I can't, really, because the social media stuff will start happening.

We have got so caught up in an insular world that swings between our phones, our computers and our heads that we have forgotten to look out of the window, and say, 'Hey! It's raining.'

Our worlds needs more time to wonder and reflect but there is too much fast paced constant distraction.

If you're always worried about being on your phone, then you really are missing out on everything that's happening in front of you.

That's what the internet is: it's like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It's like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.

What I try to do is that when I'm at home, I'm at home. We're working hard at putting away our devices and not taking calls. Sometimes, you have to, but I'll say, 'Look guys, I've got to take this call, but when I'm done, I'm all yours. I just need 20 minutes.'

When I was in lower school, I graduated from fourth grade, and the principal gave us a summer assignment to take a 30-minute reflection period every day. And, of course, there were no cell phones at the time. She said to just think. And that's lost. It doesn't exist anymore. Just imagine being on a couch and just thinking.

People are so busy positioning themselves before the screen and talking on the damn cellphones, communicating, that we're not reading, and in fact we're not really communicating, either. We're not talking to each other. There's just all these screens and wires and technology in between.

My mind is constantly going. For me to completely relax, I gotta get rid of my cell phone.

I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

Remember daydreams? No, of course you don't. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a moment, will go out.

I'm not one of those people who sits at dinner on their iPhone all night. I'm either working or I'm not. I've gone down that path where you sleep with your phone beside the bed and send an email just before you put your head down and check everything again when you wake up, and I don't like it.

Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn't have a choice.

I want to be able to leave my phone at home.

I want people to come to me open and vulnerable. When they come to the gallery, they have to leave their watches, their computers, their Blackberrys, iPads, iPhones, because we are so incredibly used to technology, and I wanted to remove that.