What the Ancient Greeks Can Teach Us About Putting the Phone Down

What the Ancient Greeks Can Teach Us About Putting the Phone Down

There's something wonderfully humbling about realising a problem we think of as modern — being distracted by our own reflection, our own image, our own curated version of ourselves — was already being told as a cautionary tale over two thousand years ago.

The Greek myth of Narcissus is one most of us know in outline, if not in detail. A beautiful young man catches sight of his own reflection in a pool of water and falls so completely in love with it that he can't look away. He stops eating. He stops moving. He stops living, in every sense but the literal one, until eventually the literal one catches up with him too.

It's a strange story to sit with. But it's also, I think, one of the most useful stories we have right now.

Why old stories still matter

We tend to think of wisdom as something new — the latest research, the latest parenting book, the latest expert opinion. And there's a place for all of that. But there's a different kind of wisdom that comes from stories that have survived thousands of years, been retold in a hundred languages, and still land the same punch every time. If a story has lasted this long, it's because it keeps being true — not true in the sense of "this actually happened," but true in the sense of "this is something about being human that doesn't go away."

The Narcissus myth wasn't written with iPhones in mind, obviously. But swap the pool of water for a phone screen, and swap admiring one's own reflection for scrolling through photo after photo of oneself, and the story barely needs updating at all. That's what history and mythology do so well — they hand us a mirror (no pun intended) that's been polished by centuries of retelling, so we can see our own moment a little more clearly.

A little Narcissus, in a picture book

This is part of what I was thinking about while writing Through Greta's Eyes. Greta is a curious, book-loving little girl, and — being the reader she is — she's been reading the old myths. So when she notices her own mum scrolling endlessly through photos of herself, missing the lavender over the fence and the magpies in the tree, Greta recognises exactly what's happening. She's seen this story before.

It's a small moment in the book, but it's one of my favourites, because it captures something I believe quite strongly: that reading books, old-fashioned, story-based reading — gives children (and grown-ups) a kind of pattern recognition for life. The myths, the histories, the fairy tales our grandparents told us — they're not just entertainment. They're thousands of years of humans saying watch out for this, we've seen it before.

Why we scroll

I don't think most of us scroll through photos of ourselves out of vanity, not really. I think we're doing something quieter and more anxious than that — trying to work out who we are, whether we're doing okay, whether we fit in, whether we measure up. Each photo is a little check-in. A little search for reassurance.

But that search rarely ends where we hope it will, because the answer was never going to be found on a screen. Narcissus didn't find himself in that pool either — he found an image, and mistook it for the truth.

Maybe the real antidote isn't a better photo, or a longer look, or one more scroll. Maybe it's just remembering, quietly and often: we are enough. Not the curated version. Not the best angle. Just us — smelling the lavender, hearing the magpies, here.

Looking back to move forward

I think there's real value in raising kids who know a few old stories — not just because the stories are lovely (though they are), but because they give children a kind of shorthand for recognising patterns in their own lives, long before they've had the life experience to work it out for themselves.

And for us grown-ups, still trying to work out who we are somewhere between the lake and the phone screen, it doesn't hurt to be reminded either. The Greeks were writing about us all along — and the wisdom holds, if we let it: “we are enough”.

Rosemary Pattison is a Melbourne-based children's author and illustrator. Her books and activity books are available on Amazon.