The smartphone malady
I am an addict. I think we all are. This new affliction is addiction to our smartphones. I believe these smartphones are making us stupid.
I have had a hunch that it’s doing something terrible with my brain for the last several years however, thus far I have tried to cope with it with several different hacks.
First, it was putting in a screentime app. The number of hours clocked and the number of times I unlock the phone is staggering.
Having data is the first step towards fixing a problem. So now I had the data, I then moved towards cutting out the biggest distractions, social media apps. I deleted facebook, Instagram & twitter. Voila, a significant chunk of my time got saved and I no longer got notifications on my phone from these apps. I also tried to delete youtube which I use way more than I need to but unfortunately, android prevents me from doing so.
But much like an addiction, the smartphone finds creative ways of pulling you back in. What facebook was doing earlier, LinkedIn does for me now. Without reason or rhyme I quite often find myself logging in and scrolling down the timeline for no good reason. Just for my daily (read hourly) fix.
Add to this whatsapp, WhatsApp is immensely useful. However, WhatsApp comes at a cost of making us connected to way too many people and way too many groups. We are constantly connected to all the various people in our lives through these groups and short conversations. This takes away my ability to be present.
A solution I have found for this is that instead of using Whatsapp compulsively and checking all the messages I receive on it, I am going to stop using Whatsapp as a messenger. I will only use it for its international calling feature, maybe for sending pictures and locations. Other than that I am going to stop checking messages on it. Yes I know the archive feature exists and yes I use it. But truthfully, how many of us can exercise the self control required to not check the red notification when we receive a message. Maybe there are some people who do it but I have to make peace with the fact that I am not one of them. And to be honest, I can easily testify that a significant amount of whatsapp messaging we can actually do without.
The above realization I had when I was trekking in the mountains last month. I realized, life is much better without living with constant distractions and your mind running in a hundred different directions. I miss the time when we used to get bored and our brain would run out of ideas. A significant chunk of our free time & energy today is spent checking our smart phones.
Earlier this morning I was thinking of doing something radical, I was thinking of moving completely to the old school digital non-smart phone. However, when I reflected on it, I would lose some valuable things my phone helps me do. My phone helps me do my banking, hail a ride, listen to music as I work out, listen to books when I walk & do work on the go.
Is there a way to get the good parts of the phone and not be tempted by the bad parts of it. One of those things I found to be limiting the use of whatsapp. So henceforth, what I am aiming to do now is to stop responding to or initiating messages on that platform.
An advantage of this would be that now instead of me checking the phone for messages, I would only be responding to phone calls on it. Now instead of me keeping tabs over it like I do with email, all I have to do is respond when the need arises.
Let’s see how this experiment pans out.
Fingers crossed!
