A yacht floats idly on the water, white parasols pop from the veranda, a young couple splash through the lapping waves and the sun beats down. In the foreground, a smartphone. The feet of the phone’s owner poke out at the end of the lounger, while the screen fills our view. The phone displays a man in a high-vis jacket smiling and waving to the camera, making a delivery to this holidaymaker’s home.

An accompanying caption interprets the scene: ‘White sandy beaches and crystal-clear delivery instructions. Inner peace, brought to you by Ring.’

Back in real life, I’m sweating on a commuter-packed tube train, quietly resenting everyone able to enjoy their August holidays abroad, imagining myself in the scene: the sea, the air, the sky, the latest technology, that ever-promised but ever-elusive consumer good: inner peace.

It makes me smile. Then it makes me angry.

Sure, the ad is polished, pointed and playful. But it strikes me that anyone who needs to be using their phone to check their Ring doorbell camera while on the beach is decidedly not in a state of inner peace. The ad’s caption should really read ‘Inescapable anxiety, brought to you by Ring.’

Further investigation reveals a series of YouTube adverts embellishing the concept: checking in on the dog on the sofa while the user is on the treadmill; spying a fox eating last night’s lasagne while at a restaurant; avoiding an insurance salesman by staying in the bath.

My inner peace is ebbing away.

These Ring ads sell the ‘always-on’ hypervigilant life, fuelling suspicion of the world beyond our front doors, and normalising – nay, celebrating – our smartphone’s power to distract us from any given moment we are living in.

But I want to be present wherever I am: on the beach, in the meeting, on the treadmill, in the restaurant, and even on the tube, because my real life is happening now and here. Inner peace will not come through consumer technology’s mediated version of that life.

In fact, inner peace will not come from the world at all (It’s called ‘inner’, after all). But it will come from the God who grants it to me (Phil 4:7). Only when I receive it am I free to rest on holiday, commute without getting angry, and be fully present in the life I’m really living. And only then can I become the kind of non-anxious presence our anxiety-stricken world so desperately needs.

Tim Yearsley
Head of Innovation, LICC