On busy on the weekend my husband brandon took our three kids to the park so i could work. When he didn’t answer my text asking him to go to the grocery store on the way home and I couldn’t track him on Find My Friends, I called. With the music blaring and my four boys singing loudly, my phone calls every two minutes went unnoticed. All eight.
I conjured up images of a horrific car accident—my entire family gone in an instant. After 15 minutes I became so disturbed that I left the house and started driving the route they were going to take home while I asked Siri to redial. As I turned the corner onto the high street, I spotted our van. Then, a few seconds later, I saw Brandon’s head bobbing in time with the music as I passed him in the other direction.
I had to ask myself: was I stressed out about being able to instantly contact a loved one, or at least locate them? Nancy Collier, New York-based licensed clinical social worker, Rev. and author of The Power of Unplugging: The Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World tells me that my neurosis about needing to reach people instantly is not an anomaly in the digital age. In fact, Collier says, with all the texting, monitoring and tracking, most of us live in a constant state of anxiety.
“It used to be that we would go for long periods of time without knowing where someone was,” says Collier. “There is now a paradigm shift from ‘the world is a safe place we can trust’ to ‘if we don’t manage and control every moment, something terrible is going to happen.’
Yet there is plenty of evidence to suggest that our loved ones, friends and even our children are safer in the world today than they were in the 1990s – in terms of violent crime, child abductions and crashes with motor vehicles. Plus, in the unlikely event of an actual emergency, authorities could use cell tower data to locate our offspring. So do we really need tracking technology?
Control your tracking impulses
For most people, monitoring the movements of family members usually begins as a virtuous pursuit. Parents, spouses, and anyone concerned about an elderly relative can use apps like Life 360, mSpy, and FamiSafe to make sure their loved ones are safe — and that they can be reached in an emergency. (Although we strongly recommend against using such apps for various reasons.)
In recent years, I’ve relied on Find My Friends as something of a crystal ball to reassure me that everything is as it should be. I use it to make sure my mom, siblings, and husband got from point A to point B, and in Brandon’s case, to find out if he left the office. Bonus: Allowing family members to follow me removed the burden of having to check in when I got where I was going.
But in an age where parents can watch their kids’ every move, teenagers follow the digital footprint of their crushes, and husbands like me freak out when their families black out for 15 minutes, a growing number of experts are questioning whether it’s healthy to be so connected to our loved ones.
