A Better Way To Think About Smartphones
PHONE BAD. Thanks for coming to my ted talk
No but seriously there’s a lot of phone bashing content out there and I think we need a bit more of a nuanced approach - if anything - I think this represents an opportunity. Phones are freaking awesome. You can speak to anyone in the world, learn anything there is to learn, order food, play games, order a cab precisely to where you are, they're magnificent..
It is we, who need to better use them.
Which is not to say that they’re not addictive, or that people aren’t trying to make them so. I think it’s quite rational to be scared about what’s happening right now. Documentaries like the social dilemma, huge interviews with people such as Tristan Harris have brought our attention to the fact that social media is designed to be addictive. More often than not, our smartphones are the way in which we use these services. ‘The Algorithm’ - obviously there’s more than one - is constantly trying to understand you as a person, what your interests are, how long you spend on each topic or post, to maximise your time and engagement with the platforms that are being used, such that they influence you - the end goal is to change your behaviour.
Personally, I find myself in a middle ground. During lockdown, my phone has become pretty much my primary source of contact with the entire outside world, and because of this I find myself checking my phone more than I ever have - even when I don’t have some notification, just to see if something has come up, or in case I’ve missed one. The tipping point, however, for me recently was when I woke up in the middle of the night - which I often do anyway - and I observed that I had an incredibly strong urge to check my phone. I decided not to, yet I still found myself lying awake with this craving. Not good. Something had to be done. I started with a tracking app, and quickly, to my horror, learned I easily average 3 hours a day on this thing.
Perhaps you can relate to this view - we want to keep our phones but suspect they’re using us a bit more than we’re using them. Tthere’s no shortage of articles, books, videos on the topic of cellphone addiction. At the more extreme end, smartphones are seen as these brian-rotting devices that perhaps we’d all be better of without, We need to think about our attention diet, we need to do Deep work, ‘Smartphones are the new cigarettes’
Moderation, rather than abstinence, is what I want. However, abstinence is easy, moderation is hard. I’m not going to quit my phone anytime soon, or uninstall these apps. Yet it’s been deeeply frustrating to me when I’ve realised rationally that there’s a problem and it hasn’t immediately changed my behaviour. I’ve already read all of those articles, watched the documentaries, nodded in agreement that yes, smartphone usage in excess is bad for me, yet here I am, still doing it.
Instead, it’s time to take it up a notch. How do people kick more serious habits? Addiction comes in many forms - and while I wouldn’t say I’m addicted, surely an antidote to addiction is a strong enough medicine to help me ween off my usage. If smartphones are the new cigarettes, well, then how do people quit smoking?
I’ve never smoked a cigarette, (I have smoked a cigar once and paid for it almost immediately, but that’s another story) however, the amount of positive reviews of Alan Carr’s book on how to stop smoking intrigued me. How would such a system work? Quitting smoking seems to be no easy task, so to offer such guarantees raises some questions.
The book spends most of its time undoing the rationalisations in your head about what you’d miss out on if you gave up smoking. The idea that one or two a day isn’t a big deal, the idea that you’ll lose friends if you stop smoking, the idea that it’s an effective stress reliever and so on. It openly states that it’s going to fill your mind with (what seem to be fairly true statements) about how smoking in literally every aspect of your life is a negative, not a positive.
After that, you just need to make a decision to stop.
Unfortunately however, unlike with cigarettes, there are some obvious significant upsides to smartphones. While I might lament the amount of time I’ve spent scrolling through instagram, I’ve never once thought to myself “damn I’m annoyed at all that time I spent using maps to get exactly to where I wanted to go”. And with social media, it does allow me to better stay in touch with friends, during this time.
The weird thing about trying to change your behaviour is that you can sort of witness your personality fracture. If I today, this moment, decide that I’m only going to spend an hour on my phone a day, I mean it, yet when it’s 3am, it’s almost a different me that says nah actually just this once I won’t sleep otherwise. We need to convince not only our wide awake, fully juiced up on willpower selves, but also our tired, I’ve-had-a-really-long-day selves.
So my new rationalisation is this - it’s not social media or phone usage which is bad. It’s the mindless usage of it. It’s the need to do it. If it’s a conscious choice, a call with a friend or so on - fine. In my head, it’s the mindless usage - not usage in itself - which is the new smoking.
Which is not to say I’m against idle time - far from it. I think it’s important. Daydreaming and kicking back and doing a whole lot of nothing are some of life’s great pleasures. This isn’t a productivity hack either - if I spend those 3 hours a day doing nothing, that’s fine. I just want them to be intentional, conscious nothings, rather than unconscious social media time. I don’t actually find instagram scrolling that restful more often than not.
I’m sure you’ve all seen lists also of strategies like uninstalling apps on your phone and I’m not going to do that so screw that shit here’s the stuff I’ve been doing which I think works better and is more practical..
Track it
There’s the old self-help quote of “what gets measured, gets managed” and it seems to ring true. You can’t fully get a sense of the problem, or even if you have one, until you get some numbers on this. Install a time tracking app. I have an android phone and use ‘StayFree’. Pretty quickly it became apparently that I was on my phone 3+ hours a day. Yikes.
Keep reminding yourself of this.
Pay really close attention
How do you actually feel while scrolling facebook/instagram/social media etc. Do you feel good in your body? Are you entertained? Rather than passively doing it, really spend some time observing your sensation of using it. Part of why social media has us constantly scrolling is that sense of a literal slot machine - eventually we’re going to hit big. The dopamine spikes in anticipation of the reward. When you do get to a post you like, really stop and sense how you feel. Is this really better than other things? How much time is spent actually enjoying what you’re doing?
Leave it, you’re not a samurai
I have this image in my head that’s worked kind of well, which is this idea of a samurai who carries their katana everywhere they go. They sleep next to it, they walk everywhere with it and so on. Yeah, they rarely ever use it, but their justification is just in case. That argument quickly becomes absurd, because you could apply it to literally any piece of equipment. So when I head out for a walk or go to the kitchen to make some food and so on and reach to pick up my phone I have this image of this insecure/paranoid samurai who is expecting to be attacked 24/7 and just think I don’t want to be this person. Sometimes I just leave it out of sight when I’m working on something. However, this isn’t always enough to stop me from getting up or reaching over to get it, which is where the next step kicks in.
Default Airplane Mode
It is now a habit of mine that when I reach a certain level of boredom I will instinctively reach for my phone. Sometimes I catch myself doing it, but oftentimes I don’t. It’s only when I open my phone up, and see that I’ve left it on airplane mode, that I have the opportunity to ask myself oh yeah, is this something I’m consciously choosing to do? Usually I’m in the middle of something, and I ask myself am I trying to escape a moment of boredom here? If I am just trying to escape, the answer is instead to just sit with the feeling of discomfort. When you have this moment, take a breath, or do something to reinforce it (the rubber band technique is one such example) just to hammer home the awareness.
Again, this doesn’t need to be the case forever, it’s just to help me realise how unconsciously I do reach for my phone. I want to train this out of me.Unfollow garbage
Pretty self explanatory, constantly be weeding out stuff that you passively follow but don’t care for. You’re literally wasting time reading about something you don’t need to know. If you don’t care, get rid of it. You only have so much time and attention. View wasted attention as wasted money. Would you go out of your way to see, or spend money to view this content? - Can be a useful thought experiment. Obviously for close friends I really do want to know how they’re doing, but for other stuff, the answer is no. So why am I wasting my attention
Commit to the long haul
Social media is going to get more enticing. Food will get tastier. Games will get better, our dopamine circuits will get hijacked more and more. This is just the way things are going to be. We need to rely on ourselves to overcome this. To decide for ourselves where we want to spend our time, energy, and focus. The battle for your attention is only going to be fought harder, and the real freedom you have in your life is control over your mind, your thoughts, your attitude and so on. Seize it.
In a very real way, you can see this time when we’re stuck with these devices as an opportunity - to better gain awareness of our attention, our impulses, such that we can be better prepared for the future. It’s a mindfulness training device. Big brain time.