Me, my phone and I

This little rectangle has far too much power over me.

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Credit: Lauren Lesley

Is there anything worse than the unconscious reflex of closing an app and locking your phone, only to unlock it approximately 3.6 seconds later and open the exact same app again - with zero conscious thought?

Oh no, I think. This little rectangle has far too much power over me.

While waiting for an important phone call last week, my mind conjured up phantom vibrations several times until the actual call came through. I feel like one could be forgiven for this. After all, a phone call is the phone’s original mandate. Its origin story.

What creeps me out is how my mind is bent towards it. Despite my best efforts to find tech-life balance with my phone, I sometimes find myself digging in it frantically like a dog on the beach. I open up each app and dissect it, desperately searching for something entertaining and unnamable.

But this post isn’t about hours wasted doomscrolling. It’s about all those other daily rituals with my phone, often more fleeting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the effect my phone has on my body and my mind. The first thing I do when I wake up is touch my phone. Full disclosure: it’s my alarm clock. While I’m generally pretty good at not getting sucked into my phone in the morning, my phone accompanies me through my entire day. I place it on the kitchen counter when I’m brewing my tea. It sits next to me on the couch like an indifferent cat. Every commute to work becomes a main character moment, The Cocteau Twins wailing from my AirPods. I second screen, scrolling through content while watching TV in the evening, my attention dividing and diluting so much that all of the free entertainment morphs to white noise.

It bothers me on a spiritual level that I basically begin and end each day by touching this device. My life extends digitally into the ether and my phone feels like an extra limb sewn to my body. Going anywhere without it, even on a short run, feels odd.

There are so many behaviours that I have cultivated because of my phone. I’m talking about that subtle, 180° tilt to check the new notifications sprouting on your lock screen. The mental load of always knowing what your battery percentage is, figuring out the least impractical time to charge, and entering the danger zone of sub 10% when you’re far from home. Studies suggest many people now pick up their phone over 100 times per day.

Having the internet in your pocket was the intellectual emancipation many people needed, but sadly these cell phones also became jail cells for our minds in the process.

I don’t wish to catastrophise about it. After all, phones are important in modern society. Perhaps leaving the house without your phone is the 21st century equivalent to a stone age person leaving the cave without their weapon. Phones are weapons in many ways. Walking late at night, the emergency phone number ready to dial as you are being followed home. It’s a map, a wallet, a translator. A shield to hold to your ear when someone you need to avoid approaches you on the street, because god forbid I have to deal with any amount of unpleasant social friction.

A recent post from Getting Better pointed to a scientific paper which suggests phones actually reduce our cognitive ability by literally just being there: “Our brain is wired to automatically pay attention to things that are important or frequently relevant to us, like our smartphones. So, when our phones are nearby - especially in our line of sight - our brains have to work extra hard to ignore them, which leaves us with less brainpower for other tasks".

I don’t know about you, but this gives me the heebie-jeebies. I love my phone. It’s powerful and brings a lot of ease and joy to my life. It’s an essential item. However, I feel the same about my Tangle Teezer hairbrush… and I don’t feel the urge to bring that thing with me everywhere.

I’m craving something different. Here are some ideas which have been doing laps around my head lately…

📞 Should we bring back landlines? I romanticise landlines, but I used to love being two hours deep into a conversation, the phone’s wire chaining both me and my attention to the wall.

🫀 Meet up with friends without phones. I want to make phone-less meet-ups, brunches and dinner parties a thing.

📷 Switch to film cameras. I’ve wanted a film camera for the past decade so I think I might save up for one. I love taking pictures and feel this is a huge reason why I like having my phone with me.

🚧 Practicing boundaries. Only checking my phone max 2-3 times per day at a pre-defined time. I would also like to keep my phone physically separate from my person.

🧱 Brick phone experiment. How would my life change with a Motorola RAZR V3?

Something has to give. I’m not sure what yet. I will report back…

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