Tag: Smartphone

I went into rehab recently…

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I went into rehab recently. It wasn’t to treat substance abuse, though both drugs and alcohol are banned at the facility I checked myself into. Rather, I went to free myself from the noise that is disrupting our mental health in the 21st century.I shut off my phone and laptop and locked them away for three days. But this was more than a digital detox: I joined 50 other people in taking a vow of silence. Instead of scrolling or chatting, we spent hours in guided meditation and the rest of the time alone with our thoughts. As silent retreats go, this one was brief. But I had never kept quiet for so long in my life, and I hadn’t been without my electronics for that long since I got my first iPhone 18 years ago.

I craved the unplugging, but I was admittedly skeptical about elements of the experiment. I didn’t think I had the patience for meditation, and my few previous attempts at yoga typically ended with the administration of Advil. […]

But underneath all that woo, I also found something true. The silent unplugging made me appreciate, in ways I hadn’t fully understood, how much my phone has hijacked my attention. In the notification-free quiet, I wondered: Have I forgotten how to just be?

 Of course, the world’s religions have been practicing forms of monastic silence for thousands of years. The difference is those ancient orders, and even those who went on silent retreats in pre-smartphone decades, didn’t have Instagram accounts. Now, when we go into silence and turn off our devices, we are entirely isolated. In our always-on, hyperconnected world, this is disorienting.⁠⁠

⁠⁠I expected I would go through some digital withdrawal, and that happened. Dozens of times, I felt an involuntary urge to reach for my phone: to check the time, to take a picture, to see if the snow had canceled my flight, to look up “upma” before ladling some onto my plate, to order Valentine’s Day flowers, to find out what I was missing and who was trying to reach me. It felt unnatural not to be scrolling while waiting for a session to begin.

But something else happened during those three days that I didn’t expect — and it was frightening…

— Dana Milbank, read more here: “I went into phone-free silence. Something disturbing happened.” (Washingon Post, February 13, 2026

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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We feel this restlessness; we lament our shrinking attention spans. But to focus on a relatively narrow question of technical measures of our attention span misses a deeper truth. The restlessness and unease of our times aren’t simply, in my experience, the vertigo of distraction and distractibility. No, that experience is itself a symptom caused by some deeper part of the unsettled self. The endless diversion offered to us in every instant we are within reach of our phones means we never have to do the difficult work of figuring out how to live with our own minds.

For many years I have, like an old man, taken a daily constitutional. I began in my early 20s, when I was a freelance writer, which meant working all day either at home or in coffee shops. I found it useful to go for a walk and clear my head. I’d go even on the bitterest days of a Chicago winter, when the wind slices at your face like a blade. I started doing this before the days of the smartphone and even before the days of podcasts on the iPod. During the walk I would just … think. I’d let my mind wander. Almost without exception, my best thinking happened on these walks. I would come back to my laptop, sometimes almost racing up the steps to my apartment, to get the thoughts down. […]

Daydreaming is a central experience of being alive and also a casualty of the attention age. Years ago, podcasts came to fill my ears during my walks, conditioning me to feel a little panicked without one. But as I’ve spent more time thinking about attention, I’ve begun to force myself to just walk and let myself be with my thoughts. I’ve also developed a set of routines, habits and hobbies that can provide the framework for a form of modified idleness, just enough to focus on to keep myself rooted and present while allowing my mind to wander. Chopping wood, making handmade pasta, going to the dog park with my canine-obsessed 6-year-old — these are all in the happy but endangered category of things to do that are neither work nor looking at my phone. […]

You can’t busy yourself out of boredom or amuse yourself out of it. Neither work nor constant entertainment provides a solution. Not for the king or for us. The problem we face is existential and spiritual, not situational. We cannot escape our own mind; it follows us wherever we go. We can’t outrun the treadmill. Our only hope at peace is to force ourselves to step off whenever we can. To learn again to be still.

— Chris Hayes, from “I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here Is How I Mastered My Own.” (NY Times, January 3, 2025)

Notes:

  • Photo from morning walk. 6:55 a.m. 18° F, feels like 0° F, wind gusts up to 30 mph. January 7, 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. See more photos from this walk here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Technology…the knack of so arranging the world so that we need not experience it.

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“Technology…the knack of so arranging the world so that we need not experience it.” — Max Frisch Homo Faber (1957)”

This is a book about the disappearance of experience…

Certain types of experience—some rooted deeply in our evolutionary history, such as face-to-face interaction and various forms of pleasure-seeking; others more recent and reflective of cultural norms, such as patience and our sense of public space and place—are fading from our lives. Many of these experiences are what, historically, have helped us form and nurture a shared reality as human beings.

Mediating technologies have been a significant force behind these changes. By “technology” I mean the devices such as computers, smartphones, smart speakers, wearable sensors, and, in our likely future, implantable objects, as well as the software, algorithms, and Internet platforms we rely on to translate the data these devices assemble about us. Technology also includes the virtual realities and augmented realities we experience through our use of these tools. Our integration of these tools into our daily lives has blurred the boundary between “virtual” things—things not grounded in physical reality that we encounter while online or via mediating technologies—and “real” things embedded in physical space.

These technologies mediate between us and our world. For now, we still have some choice in how much mediation we allow. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people lived lives of near-constant mediation out of necessity, as work, education, and social life migrated online. Culturally we were prepared for this shift, given how much time we were already spending using screens large and small to mediate our daily lives, and our evolving preference for such forms of interaction.

That preference encourages the embrace of new forms of mediated experience that do not necessarily improve our interactions as human beings, even as they also bring greater convenience. Our understanding of experience has become disordered, in ways large and small. More and more people mistrust their own experiences. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus. We are beginning to see hints of how these new ways of experiencing the world—more mediated, more personalized, more immediate yet less bounded by the realities of the physical world—have altered our understanding of reality.

— Christine Rosen, from the Introduction of “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World” (W. W. Norton & Company, September 10, 2024)

Book Reviews:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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The beautiful thing in some ways about the smartphone, for example, is that my robotic vacuum will never do anything but vacuum instead of me. But my smartphone can be an instrument in that I can decide every time I pick it up whether I’m going to use it in a way that actually develops my heart, soul, mind and strength that is subordinate to and for the purposes of love.

If I pick up my smartphone and I develop a relationship with people I’ll never meet — influencers and celebrities — by watching videos, that diminishes me. But if I pick up my smartphone and I call my daughter or FaceTime her, that activates love and relationship. Basically, it’s using the thing to more deeply engage with the world rather than to retreat from my investment in the world.

— Andy Crouch, from “Nurturing Our Relationships in a Digital World” (The New York Times · Interviewed by Tish Harrison Warren · June 4, 2023). Crouch is the author “The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World.”

Entire article is worth a read here.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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We’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting … the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you. Scientists rely on dopamine as a kind of universal currency for measuring the addictive potential of any experience. The more dopamine in the brain’s reward pathway, the more addictive the experience. In addition to the discovery of dopamine, one of the most remarkable neuroscientific findings in the past century is that the brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place. Further, pleasure and pain work like opposite sides of a balance. We’ve all experienced that moment of craving a second piece of chocolate, or wanting a good book, movie, or video game to last forever. That moment of wanting is the brain’s pleasure balance tipped to the side of pain.

— Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Dutton, August 24, 2021)