Lifestyle

Our cellphones are killing us

We are, it seems, long past the moment when there’s nothing worth doing unless we’re on the phone — photographing it, uploading it, texting it, tweeting it.

And it’s killing us.

On June 7, a New Jersey man fell 40 feet to his death while trying to photograph the sunset in Maine’s Acadia National Park. In 2007, 56-year-old Faith Wise fell into the water at the same park and drowned.

Joshua BurwellFacebook

“She was holding [her] cellphone in the air,” Park Ranger Ed Pontbriand said, “trying to get her friend to listen to the waves.”

Last Christmas Day, 33-year-old Joshua Burwell walked right off a cliff and fell 60 feet to his death in California. “He wasn’t watching where he was walking,” Bill Bender of San Diego Lifeguards told NBC News. “He was looking down at the device in his hands.”

In 2009, Deborah Matis-Engle was sentenced to six years in prison for texting while driving — more specifically, she was paying bills online — and smashing into another vehicle, which burst into flames and killed the driver inside.

Just months after the crash, while awaiting trial, the California Highway Patrol spotted Matis-Engle texting while driving on two separate occasions.

“This collision had absolutely no impact on her,” the prosecutor said.

How has it become unbearable to drive, walk, climb subway stairs, ride a bicycle, wait for a green light or push a baby stroller without being on our phones?

In one of the more ironic cellphone deaths in recent memory, a 32-year-old female driver died while updating her Facebook profile. She’d apparently been listening to Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” on the radio.

“The happy song makes me HAPPY,” she wrote before crashing. Emergency responders discovered that she’d also been taking selfies shortly before the accident. Wikipedia has recorded 54 known deaths since 2014 that were caused by attempted selfies.

According to the CDC, over eight people are killed and 1,161 are injured each day in the US by distracted driving. Texting while driving is now the leading cause of teenage deaths in this country. Anecdotally, emergency rooms are seeing an uptick of injuries to “petextrians” — people who text while walking and have, say, run into a 300-pound bear (California, 2012), fallen into a fountain at the mall (Pennsylvania, 2011) or fallen onto train tracks (Pennsylvania, 2012).

Just two weeks ago, a teenage girl jumped onto the tracks at Bergen Street to retrieve her cellphone. She was run over by the train and nearly died, but once EMS got her on a stretcher, the photos said it all: She was texting and calling, as enraptured as ever with the device that almost got her killed.

Chenelle Agnew dropped her phone on the subway tracks in Brooklyn — only to risk her life retrieving it.Paul Martinka

“I saw her in the tracks trying to pick something up,” the train’s operator told the Post. “And then I heard her hit. I heard the thump. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead.”

According to a 2012 Time magazine study, 84 percent of people around the world said they couldn’t go a single day without their cellphones. Clearly, they mean it.

How did we get here? How has it become unbearable to drive, walk, climb subway stairs, ride a bicycle, wait for a green light or push a baby stroller without being on our phones?

We’ve all seen otherwise sane-looking, well-put-together professionals crossing major city streets without once looking up from their phones, and the narcissism is staggering: The onus for their own personal safety is suddenly on everyone else. Anyone who’s ever tried to catch a train at rush hour knows the excruciating agony of trying to work around a commuter who’s slowed down, immune to all else but the phone.

“We’re seeing an uptick in people getting hit by cars and bikes at low speed,” Dr. Dara Kass of Bellevue told WPIX in February. She cited a SUNY study estimating 10 percent of all ER visits are cellphone-related. “We wonder if they’re distracted when they’re entering the crosswalk.”

There’s yet to be a definitive study on the ways cellphones are rewiring our brains, but there’s all kinds of data proving our dependence. According to the Time magazine study, 50 percent of American adults admitted to sleeping with their cellphone, holding it like a security blanket.

Fifty percent of American adults admitted to sleeping with their cellphone.Shutterstock

Collectively, Americans check their phones 8 billion times a day. For the average person, that shakes out to 46 times a day. A July 2015 Gallup poll found that 41 percent of Americans check their phones a few times an hour. A Baylor University study found that the average female college student spends 10 hours per day on the phone.

“That’s astounding,” said Baylor’s lead researcher, James Roberts, Ph.D. “As cellphone functions increase, addictions to this seemingly indispensable piece of technology becomes an increasingly realistic possibility.”

Aside from research that shows our brains release dopamine and serotonin — those feel-good chemicals triggered by drugs, sex, and now text message alerts and likes on Instagram — there’s another, bleaker aspect to our dependence: an inability to tolerate our own thoughts, or to register that there are others around us.

The cellphone has become the equivalent of an adult pacifier, and users increasingly have the self-control of toddlers: When did it become acceptable to play music, video games or movies without headphones? When did the three-dimensional natural world, or the human being across from you at the dinner table, become less appealing than a screen?

In a widely circulated clip from 2013, comic Louis CK explained it best. “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something,” he said. “That’s what the phone is taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty — that forever empty, that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there . . . That’s why we text and drive. Everybody’s murdering each other with their cars, but people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second.”

We’re also minimizing the power of daydreaming. A UC Santa Barbara study found that people who engaged in abstract thought did 41 percent better in creative thinking exercises. People who reported positive daydreaming were the least depressed, and no matter the culture, those who daydream have a tendency to achieve their long-term goals.

Steve Jobs in 2010AP

Perhaps that’s why creative people often say they get their best ideas in the shower: It’s the only place you can’t use your phone. During an online summit of the world’s leading productivity experts, psychologist Scott Kaufman reported that according to one study, 72 percent of people had their best ideas while showering.

“You want to make sure that you make time and room for solitude,” Kaufman said. “That can take a lot of forms, like taking a daily stroll to reconfigure your brain.”

A few years after Steve Jobs died, reporter Nick Bilton revealed that the Apple co-founder wouldn’t let his own children use the iPad. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” Jobs told Bilton, who reported that most parents in Silicon Valley do the same.

“We have seen the dangers of technology firsthand,” then-Wired editor Chris Anderson said. “I’ve seen it in myself. I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”

While there’s not yet been a longitudinal study of the effect of screen time on children and teenagers — the technology is both too young and rapidly evolving — we can see the mutations in society. Increasingly, people live double lives: one in the real world, one online. Finstagram is the tonic to Instagram — the latter is where teenagers post their perfect photos, the enviable, fake life they actively curate — while finstas are their secret, real accounts where they’re allowed to be less than perfect.

“My rinsta” — or real Instagram — “is the filtered me,” one 19-year-old girl told Elle last July. “My finsta [is] so genuine . . . it also shows me sad, scared, drunk or embarrassed.”

Kiersten Rickenbach CervenyFacebook

Adults are no less immune. Last October, The Post reported on the prevalence of secret, double lives online, sparked by the death of a beautiful young doctor named Kiersten Rickenback Cerveny.

On her Facebook page, Cerveny had it all: a handsome husband, three beautiful children, a thriving practice, vacations in Whistler and Turks and Caicos, a $1.2 million home in suburban New York.

All the while, she was dissatisfied enough to party downtown with two men, who took her to an apartment and left her to die of a drug and alcohol overdose in a dingy vestibule.

Cerveny’s husband, a family friend told The Post, was “utterly distraught” — he, along with everyone else in their lives, had no idea.

There’s something remarkably sad about cultivating our own lives online — lives we wish we had, think we want, hope other people will envy. How much of that now motivates our decision-making — where to eat, what to buy, where to travel? How much of that explains why we’d rather record an experience than live it?

Tellingly, it’s people who perform for a living who seem to hate it the most. In May, Adele berated an audience member who was holding her cellphone in the air, trying to capture the moment.

“Can you stop filming me with that video camera?” Adele asked. “Because I’m really here in real life. You can enjoy it in real life.”

It’s a gratifying moment — one that was shared, online, by a fellow fan who’d captured it on their phone.