How to Overcome Your Smart Phone Fixation
Unable to leave your smart phone tucked away for even ten minutes? Welcome to the club.
Ask yourself: when was the last time you immersed yourself in a single activity for one hour without interruption? And even if you tried, how tempted were you to reach for your smart phone and check messages, news alerts or social media feeds? We’ve lost the natural rhythm of our existence, craving the next digitally induced dopamine hit like a junkie.
Gone is our natural ability to experience time as duration. We’ve voluntarily abandoned a continuous, non-fragmented experience of time. Just as cable news broadcasters since the 1990s have overwhelmed their audiences with constantly breaking stories, news tickers and stock market updates, our cell phones have become reality filters that suspend the natural unfolding of time.
We allow ourselves to be plunged into a constant state of breathlessness where one moment unnaturally collapses into the next, shattering our temporal experience. Experience as duration has been superseded by the numbing experience of the “ever next” notification. Time is out of joint in our digital age. Smart phones puncture our field of perception and render the virtual more real and immediate than our actual environment. It’s as if the expanse of our natural horizon has contracted like a taut elastic band and curled into the shape of a six-inch square in our palms, causing constant distraction and bad posture.
We’ve essentially substituted the layered richness and splendor of our immediate experience with a constant bombardment of smileys and trivial chatter.
There once was a non-discrete flow to our existence that was carried by habits and duties. Our existence used to be submerged in the world that we inhabit. There was a clear rhythm to things. We call people who’ve mastered that rhythm “elegant.” You can observe that elegance when you visit a carpenter or some other traditional craftsman, like a calligrapher, in their studios: there’s a solemn beauty and devotion to their artisanship. Every move has its purpose. There’s no haste because that would have a detrimental effect on the work at hand. Instead, you can witness a steady, almost spellbinding rhythm of how the brush is used, of how the wood is carved.
Think about it: rather than gaping at your phone every few minutes, wouldn’t you much rather live your life as gracefully as such artisans?
Cataloging Our Lives Rather Than Living Them
Yet another alarming effect of our near-constant smart phone use is the deformation of our experiences into commodities. Many people are no longer able to enjoy a dinner at a restaurant without first taking a picture of their meal and posting it on social media. The moment we do that, we cut ourselves off from our own experience. It means turning what is most personal and temporal into a thing: it constitutes the reification of an individually experienced moment. Rather than enjoying the dinner in all its abundance — taking in the guests at our table and the pleasant conversation, the smell of the food and the taste of the wine — we opt to sever ourselves from the uniqueness of that experience in return for a bland copy, for no better reason than to impress our digital followers.
Events are now measured by their potential exhibition value. These days, people even choose holiday destinations for their Instagram-friendly sceneries. We’re effectively turning ourselves into spectators of our own lives.
When we nowadays experience something unexpected and miraculous, we feel the immediate urge to draw our smart phones and shoot a picture of the event, thus destroying the magic of the moment. It’s as if we’ve replaced our own gaze with a constantly probing and judging look over our shoulders, second-guessing at any moment how our social media followers might react to this or that occurrence.
I wonder: How exactly did it happen that we started to attribute greater truthfulness to a digitally distributed copy than to the original event and our own physical experience of it?
The Distortion of Our Memory
We don’t yet know how these practices will effect the creation of episodic memories. Yet it seems to be a fair guess that, if we don’t allow ourselves to experience our lives in an unfiltered way, this will have adverse effects on how we remember events that we so carelessly separate ourselves from.
Additionally, it would be surprising if the killing of dead time — still see anybody on a platform waiting for a train not staring at their cell phones? — won’t have any effect on memory development and retention. If we don’t focus on a particular task, our minds constantly sway between past and future events, revisiting previous experiences and visualizing anticipated scenarios. Like sleep, these phases of inactivity are tremendously important for memories to settle and future plans to take shape. It’s very likely that by denying ourselves these little havens of tranquility that allow our minds to wander, we negatively impact our capacity to retain memories and hence our ability to make informed decisions based on past experiences.
When I walk down the street and notice that nearly everybody coming my way is staring at their handheld devices, I always feel reminded of old black and white movies in which people smoke incessantly. Think of all those Humphrey Bogart films: barely a scene without the characters puffing away on their cigarettes. Knowing what we do now about the grave health threats posed by smoking, this behavior strikes us as odd and outdated. I wouldn’t be surprised if future generations will similarly look at us and shake their heads given the unacknowledged mental health issues caused by our addiction to smart phones.
Reclaiming Our Natural Rhythm
Yet perhaps this crisis can lead to a better understanding of our existence and a healthier mode of living. There’s hope that more and more people will grow tired of keeping their existence continuously suspended in a state of breathlessness between the latest news alert and the most recent social media posting. The current popularity of courses on meditation and mindfulness is symptomatic of a desire to rediscover our natural immersion in the flow of time. That these offers come increasingly in the form of smart phone apps is, of course, an irony of history.
In the end it’s all about recovering your breath, about re-establishing your innate rhythm, from the constant onslaught of attention grabbing feeds and messages. After all, the digital age is still young, and we’re currently going through something akin to an adolescent phase with our smart phones. There’s legitimate hope that we will come to a more adult mastery of operating our devices.
As enticing as it is to have a digital simulacrum of the world constantly at our fingertips, there’s a growing desire to reconnect to the actual world. “Digital detox” has become a growing trend, with resorts offering stressed clients a retreat without phones or other digital communication. Small, incremental changes in behavior — silencing notifications and setting an alarm to check them on an hourly basis rather than when they come in, no smart phones at the dinner table or in the bedroom, no parallel screen use, etc. — equally give rise to a re-evalutation and increased appreciation of our immediate surroundings. Almost everybody who tries these steps sees results within a week and won’t go back to an unfettered bombardment of news and feeds. Crucially, these changes lead to an immediate boost in well-being because we reconnect, at least partially, to the natural rhythm of time.
Finally, there’s hope that a growing number of social media users will become exasperated of the photo-shopped selfies that others upload of themselves to their profiles. Oftentimes, the compulsive documentation of a seemingly picture-perfect life is little else than a vacuous showcasing triggered by a sense of insecurity and deficiency. By chasing the exhibition value of every event we experience, we effectively make sure to miss the actual experience — and thus, paradoxically, the life we’re yearning to live and striving to project. Our memories will be all the poorer for it.
Ultimately, our personal experiences and memories are the most valuable elements of our individual lives (they effectively are us), and we should be careful not to treat them as reified commodities. Instead, we may learn again to perceive our immediate environment no longer as unspectacular and wanting in comparison to the pictures in our feeds, but full of wonder, beauty and bliss. That way, we can engineer a shift of significance away from the captured, filtered and uploaded instant, and back to the unmediated moment with its unique intensity.
Freeing The Empowering Potential of Technology
Once we’ve recaptured a sense of preciousness for the things at hand that require our attention and devotion, we can even turn our handheld devices into tools of emancipation. It’s true, the digital revolution gave us smart phones, and we chose to become feeble social media actors who sheepishly vie for the applause of strangers. But the technology can also empower us to become directors of our own lives. Rather than documenting our daily experiences eager for likes, we can use the technology to create something uniquely personal and therefore uniquely creative. We can transform our lives. We can become artful photographers and film directors who bring spellbinding pieces of art into the world, disseminated easily across the globe thanks to social media.
Yet for that to accomplish, you’d need to ground your experience in the immediacy and magic of the here and now. Look up — and start right away.
— Felix Grisebach is the co-founder of the Arkadia Academy for Self-Discovery™ in Santa Monica, Calif.
