Tackling the Phone.

Removing great suffering from our lives.

Last year I did a post about tackling social media, because I think in many ways we can look at it as a largely self-destructive habit; some might think it extreme, but smoking or alcoholism have a lot of similarities! Even the way people pop their phone out of their jacket pocket, stare down at Instagram or TikTok for a few moments, and then slide it back away.

Life in the City ƒ/4 1/500 46 mm ISO100

But, to a great extent, the thing that enables this unhealthy social media behaviour is actually our phones—smartphones in particular. Dumbphones had most of the useful functionality of smartphones—communication, photo taking, and web browsing that was sufficient in a pinch but not all-engrossing. It’s the massive social media app economy that exploded with the iPhone that really created a lot of the problems.

I think we suffer a lot because of our phones. However, I think it’s just in the past few years that this has become incredibly widely understood, and just not having one has gone from weird to unusual, but understandable. People are doing all kinds of experiments in light phones, dumb phones, and dropping their phone entirely. The idea of pagers is even intriguing!

Society also clearly suffers. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve had lots of times with friends and family where I, and sometimes everyone, is more focused on phones than each other. That’s really sad and pretty clearly terrible!

That’s all because while social media is obviously a harmful element of our smart phone addictions, I think the issues with smartphones go far further, and I don’t think we discuss this enough. An episode of Search Engine touched on the way PJ Vogt thought it would be amazing when he was growing up if he could bring something like a computer with him anywhere, and I had a similar experience. I remember growing up and using YouTube fairly early on—and experiencing the platform transform with more and more content. I used to spend a lot of time in the “computer room” sitting and watching YouTube. I remember when my mom got the first generation iPod Touch for her birthday and that it had a YouTube app, the ability to take the internet—and at the time what I thought was its most compelling application—anywhere seemed amazing. But nearly two decades later, I can reflect and see the error of my ways. Having a room where you use technology is great, because it spatially reminds you what you’re doing; back then, I’d always have to sit in the same chair in the same room watching YouTube, after a while I’d reflect on the fact that I was doing this and stop. But, once smartphones existed, you could take this stuff anywhere, and easily pause or play at any moment. It used to take several minutes for our desktop gateway computer to start up — even the iPod Touch was never really off.

All of this is to say, the smartphone, and the iPod Touch before it (I remember these being the gateway drug for young people without phones) amount to distraction machines. They enables instant everything, they wake instantly, open a site with a few taps, and created entirely new communication paradigms with read receipts and the like. They make technology instant.

This was like a weapon of mass destruction being used on our attention: delayed gratification was gone, you could have anything at anytime. All the while, the phones and other devices kept adding just enough functionality to give us some reasonable cases for not tossing them, and spending more time on them—which increasingly every technology player has incentivized themselves to want—as services and ads and subscriptions become an ever bigger part of technology. GPS, the everywhere camera, mobile payments, Uber—many of these things feel like essential reasons to have a phone, and to have it on you at all times. Even though many of these things have analog or single-purpose devices that used to work perfectly fine!

You could try to have a better relationship with technology, but increasingly that’s impossible—Windows has ads integrated into the UI, Apple advertises services in the settings, even when you unsubscribe from everything sent your way Gmail feeds you ads. It’s rational to go “I have alcohol in my house, but am not an alcoholic”, and think that you can easily be more measured in your use of modern tech, but modern tech will do its best to shove things down your throat. It’s not having alcohol in your house, it’s have an endlessly restocked bar with every drink imaginable right in your kitchen and with new deliveries every hour—and this just being the way all of society is by default.

What I’ve Done

While there were certainly fighting words above, I haven’t gotten rid of my smartphone yet; maybe I will at some point, but in the meantime I keep discovering new ways to slice up its power over me, benefit more from it, and have a healthier relationship.

One annoyance is that my phone is what I use to track workouts, and to listen to music. These are the useful functions that keep us locked in a bad system. There are solutions to these of course, and I’ll talk to them in a future post. So make sure you’re subscribed!

I used to use app screen time limits, so I couldn’t use anything bad for over 5 minutes, but I think this is probably just a tool which was created so that users don’t do the actually effective thing, and delete the app. When you have the time limits you can still use them, and when you get blocked you can easily disable them, especially on iOS! The real solution here is deleting all the bad stuff — Instagram, Micro-blogging, News (if something is really important you’ll hear about it!) etc.

But, you can find creative ways to waste time on your phone, just use the browser—of which your phone has several, including ones embedded in other apps. Basically anything can be used in an unhealthy way on a phone. So I also track my screen on time every day, with an aim to keep it below 2 hours, which is itself a crazy amount.

There are also things you can do that both make your phone harder to use, but also make you better off—not only because they make your phone harder to use, but because they’ll teach you something. I decided to switch my phone to the great DVORAK keyboard—a feature every phone basically has, and now I’m both learning a better keyboard layout, and less able to shoot off messages and queries at lightning speed. A lot of people I know also put their phone in another language, and this is something I will also probably do again.

Notifications are also very dangerous, because they draw us into our phones, and specific apps. I have most turned off—I’ll get a call, but that’s more or less it, anything less can’t be all that urgent. If it is, the person will call, we didn’t even have universal instant messaging just a decade or two ago. Instant messaging has often also become a hook with which social media compaies keep us in their ecosystems and their apps on our phones. I’ve moved basically everybody I know to Signal, which is open source, secure, and has call functionality as well as texts, and great group features. It has all the useful communication and none of the dark patterns or socially destructive stuff. Within Signal I’ve also turned off read receipts, which turned off the stress of me asking myself “Why isn’t this person responding!?” or “What are they thinking!?” or “Did I say something wrong!?” it makes everything less instant.

I’m even increasingly trying to just email people. Email used to annoy me because it included threads and wasn’t instant, but that’s exactly what enables it to be used for healthy, sane conversation between people. Like real mail. Email is also easy to organize, universal, and lets people you don’t know reach out if you’d like.

Then finally, I just try to keep my phone around less. I try to keep it on a table in a single room, to get back towards how I used to use a computer growing up, and sometimes I even go better I use the computer for this. Not only is the computer less addictive and omnipresent, it also does many things better! I’ve even changed my morning routine—these days when I wake up my phone is not the first thing I look at, in fact I try to go as long as possible, sometimes until noon or later, without even picking it up.

How My Life Has Changed

Like with a lot of anxious behaviours, ironically the less I use my phone, the less desire I have to use it. Even in the moments when it is available and I do have the time, I just don’t tend to pick it up. I look at it a lot like a tool—I wouldn’t carry a screwdriver around in my pocket all the time, if I need it, I will grab it.

My using my phone less often also helps the people around me. It’s a lot more awkward to pull out or stare at your phone when you’re with someone else and they aren’t using it at all, and don’t even have it out. Its a bit like being at a meal and having a side conversation with someone at the next table over the whole time as you ignore your companion.

Since so much of what we do on our phones is social, this also means inevitably bringing family and friends along with us to some degree anyways. Everyone in your circle can detox together.

Perhaps it’ll be surprising, but all of this had lead to me appreciating my phone more. It all feels a bit like when smartphones were new “so much this little thing can do ...” I guess it makes sense when the phone has become so much less of a vector for brain-destroying slop and addiction!

I expect to use it even less in the future, and of course I’ll share how I do that, and what I learn about it here as things go along. Clearly a big part of this will be exploring single-use devices, but also learning to live differently. We live in an amazing ultra-high information world these days, but I think increasingly accepting that sometimes not knowing is power can be even more amazing.