Meanwhile : Is there life before death? A smartphone-age reflection

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Meanwhile : Is there life before death? A smartphone-age reflection

Published: 18 Apr. 2025, 00:05

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Yang Sung-hee

The author is a columnist at the JoongAng Ilbo.

“Is there life after death?” The question, once a profound inquiry of religion and philosophy, now feels distant. In its place, a new question has emerged for the modern world: Is there life before death?

That reversal appears in "Invite the Wind into Your Life" by French author Pascal Bruckner. The line he offers is not rhetorical: “Do we love enough, give enough, embrace enough?” The question cuts through the blur of daily existence, asking whether we truly live while alive.

Bruckner’s book explores what he calls the “age of listlessness,” a time shaped by the rise of smartphones and the global pandemic. His concern is not death itself, but how technology has dimmed our ability to live fully.

The Korean translation of the French book ″Invite the Wind into Your Life' by Pascal Bruckner [INFLUENTIAL]

“The smartphone brings the world into your home. Because the world comes to me, I no longer need to go out to meet it,” Bruckner writes. “It offers a busy life while removing the need to experience it.”

It is a paradox that many recognize. Holding a phone creates the illusion of connection and vitality. Yet what it offers is a filtered, abstract version of life, drained of immediacy and meaning.

Group of young adult friends using smartphones in the subway. [SHUTTERSTOCK]

To illustrate the spiritual fatigue of our times, Bruckner invokes "Oblomov," the 19th-century novel by Ivan Goncharov. The title character, a nobleman immobilized by indecision and inertia, is often seen as a symbol of passive existence. “If one does not know why he lives,” writes Goncharov, “he lives carelessly from day to day.” Oblomov greets nightfall with relief, burying any deeper questions in 12 — or 24 — hours of sleep.

In Bruckner’s reading, the smartphone era breeds a new kind of Oblomovism — one in which people create, with their own hands, a “spacious coffin” called routine and lie in it comfortably, awaiting the end.

Such imagery may seem too cynical or dark. But recent tragedies sparked by conspiracy-driven online communities serve as a reminder: The smartphone’s narrowing of perception can yield real-world consequences. A device that offers infinite information can also entrap its user in a shallow pool of half-truths and distractions.

There is a growing skepticism toward smartphones, and Bruckner gives language to that unease. His message is not one of rejection but of awareness. Life, he reminds us, does not exist on a screen. It demands presence, risk and engagement — before death.

Translated from the JoongAng Ilbo using generative AI and edited by Korea JoongAng Daily staff.