Too many attachments

I’ve been a functional human being doing just fine with my iPhone 11 for several years, but the confluence of two unfortunate events is undermining my daily operations.

First, Apple released iOS 26.5. This required 18.5 GB to install. I, apparently, do not have 18.5 GB to spare on my iPhone 11.

Second, my youngest son, Carlton, appeared as William Barfeè in four performances of the Smoke Rise Academy of Arts production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” This required approximately 987 trillion TB of memory to hold all of the photos and videos I took of Mr. Barfeè and his magic foot (IYKYK) during those performances.

This confluence of circumstances has caused deep contemplation on the meaning of life, and, more specifically, attachments.

I had been trying for several weeks to get Carlton to pull down the photos from my phone that he wanted for his performance Instagram account, which you can follow and keep up with the budding career of this star of stage and stage (he hasn’t yet starred on any screens.)

Anyone with any awareness of this new social media age we live in will know that performers and athletes must have clips on their socials, and that’s what the parents are for. Oh, and to pay for food, clothing and shelter… and to transport them to endless rehearsals and performances… and to manage their sleep schedules… and to ensure water bottles are located and always filled with water at precisely 39 degrees (I could go on, but I’ll spare you the other details of Carlton’s rider and just let you know that during show weeks, my full-time job is as Carlton’s valet.)

Carlton has shamed… er… trained me on how best to take videos of his performances on my iPhone so that they will be most useful for his adoring fans to consume on Instagram and lead to ever increasing fame and fortune. You can see where this is headed.

“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” required so many videos that the storage on my phone became so limited that they couldn’t be extracted through the typical means.

Frustrated, Carlton’s tech support advice was “You need a new phone!”

My solution has been to whittle away at the photos, apps and other bits of data on my antiquated phone so that the update will install and I can then successfully transmit the precious video files. I feel like a sweaty Jyn Erso scaling the data towers on Scarif as she tries to upload the Death Star plans to the awaiting Rebel forces just beyond the planet’s defense shield. No one is shooting laser guns at me (pew pew pew), but I’m still under a lot of pressure.

I dumped all the big apps, like the social media platforms, and the smaller ones I never used anyway, pretty easily. I can just go back and download them again later. What has taken the most time has been the deleting of “large attachments” from my Message app. There must be 4.897 billion such images, and wow, I just realized it must be super annoying to be in text threads with me.

Apparently, I have sent and received WAY too many large attachments.

In the hours I’ve spent discarding the most hilarious memes, GIFs and historic family photos from 2009, I’ve had a lot of time to contemplate this phenomenon of having too many attachments.

In life, as with the iPhone 11, too many attachments slows you down and renders you less able to function. Your mind is scattered. You are unable to focus.

This metaphor is so on the nose, I don’t think I could invent a more applicable comparison to modern life.

I am sure I will eventually take out a second mortgage and get a new phone. The truth is, I don’t want to. I don’t want the iPhone I have now. I am rapidly reaching an age at which I feel the impulse to rail against the ravages of modernity even as I send my attachments, listen to my podcasts and, yes, post my blogs. This device in my pocket holds too many attachments for me to manage.

So that’s the profound lesson I’m choosing to take away from this whole technological inconvenience. If I had just a few, really good attachments and focused on those, maybe I would not need to clog up my life with all those other attachments.

Besides, it’s the human attachments that make life so much more meaningful.

I found a meme about it I can text to you.