Hidden in the NY Times Business section, the story of one smart phone addict's attempt at recovery.
Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain
By Kevin Roose
Feb. 23, 2019
"I’ve been a heavy phone user for my entire adult life. But sometime last year, I crossed the invisible line into problem territory. My symptoms were all the typical ones: I found myself incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies or having long uninterrupted conversations. Social media made me angry and anxious, and even the digital spaces I once found soothing (group texts, podcasts, YouTube k-holes) weren’t helping. I tried various tricks to curb my usage, like deleting Twitter every weekend, turning my screen grayscale and installing app-blockers. But I always relapsed."
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"When we started, I sent her my screen time statistics, which showed that I had spent 5 hours and 37 minutes on my phone that day, and picked it up 101 times — roughly twice as many as the average American."
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"Allow me a bit of bragging: Over the course of 30 days, my average daily phone time, as measured by the iPhone’s built-in screen time tracker, has dwindled from around five hours to just over an hour. I now pick up my phone only about 20 times a day, down from more than 100. I still use my phone for email and texting — and I’m still using my laptop plenty — but I don’t itch for social media, and I often go hours without so much as a peek at any screen."
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"But there is a way out. I haven’t taken an M.R.I. or undergone a psychiatric evaluation, but I’d bet that something fundamental has shifted inside my brain in the past month. A few weeks ago, the world on my phone seemed more compelling than the offline world — more colorful, faster-moving and with a bigger scope of rewards."
When I was growing up in Western Pennsylvania in the 1950s, some days I used to just lay in the tall grass on a hill and watch the clouds pass by for hours. I'd imagine shapes in the clouds and just let my mind wander, there's a pirate ship, an angel, a bear, a castle. Children would run the hills all day, assembling teams for baseball or football, building igloos, or just wandering aimlessly alive.
We were learning important social and life skills. We were learning to deal with people one on one and in groups. We were connecting with the natural world around us. We were mapping our entire environment in our heads.
Today, people are sacrificing much more than they realize with their addictive dependence on smart phones losing those critical mental and social skills while occupying a solitary confinement cell of their own making. Technology, like just about everything else, has its positive and negative sides. Information at your fingertips is an incredibly powerful tool but when the tool takes over for your brain, becoming in effect an "exo-brain", who is the user and who is the tool?
I truly believe smart phones are a huge cause of many of the problems we face today. They've fundamentally changed the way our brains work, how we process information, use (or more accurately no longer use) our short and long term memory, are losing our brains' critical ability to map our environment, shortening our attention spans to milliseconds, etc. They are constant companions surreptitiously changing our brains and the way we view and understand our world. They can and are being used to manipulate our minds, including during elections, the effect of which alone should be cautionary tale enough to shock people back into reality. But so far, it hasn't.
I don't need a smart phone. I'm smart. So is everyone else. Until they become addicted to their smart phone.
Now put down that damn smart phone and read on:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/business/cell-phone-addiction.html
