I hate my phone

but we can't break up

Is there anything that makes us feel as simultaneously connected to and disconnected from others as our smartphones?

The people we love are all “there,” sometimes in messages, sometimes just in pictures. Most of the rest of humanity is there, too, and you can find them through various social media platforms. There’s also most of the sum of our knowledge as a species up until now, and also lots of made up stories about said knowledge.

The internet is an egalitarian place in that anyone can publish whatever they want to publish (like me!), sans gatekeepers, and we get to carry instant access to it around in our pockets. We take it out hundreds, sometimes thousands of times a day. It’s literally irresistible.

The thought of being without it, in fact, feels both terrifying a daring. “What if there’s an emergency?” as if emergencies before cell phones and internet access always resulted in disasters. As if we didn’t use it 99% of the time to simply distract ourselves.

So going out for a walk these days without my phone feels like a radical act, which if you ask me is so, so, beyond pathetic. “Oh, I forgot what I used to do before I had a phone in front of me all the time! Is this how you look at things? I can’t remember.”

This is not me, but it might as well be: staring at my phone instead of looking at what’s actually in front of me. (Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash)

My own phone has me feeling like a listless zombie much of the time, full from its empty but addictive calories and forever hungry. The more I’m on it, the more I’m desperate to find something, anything that will stimulate in me a quick release of dopamine, or really, any emotion at all beyond the baseline numbness and unease where so many of us have landed.

I’m like that rat in the cage, obsessively pushing on the lever hoping to get an intermittent treat. Make me feel something, preferably good, goddamnit!

I remember too another experiment, this one with humans put into an empty room for 20-30 minutes at a time, accompanied only by a device they could use to shock themselves. Most chose to shock themselves rather than sit alone with their thoughts.

What has happened to our brains?

This is all of us, of course. And it’s not because we’re moral failures. Phones have been specifically designed to keep us on them as much as possible, and combined with social media also designed to keep us there as much as possible (oh, the algorithm!), we’re about as strong against them as a drug addict swimming in cocaine.

I mean, can you imagine how much the makers of Facebook high-fived each other, elated that they’d come up with the concept of “notifications,” and later, “algorithms,” which would contribute in such a powerful way to taking away our collective ability to agree on what constitutes a fact, or truth?

Did we forget that everyone can lie, even the people who are telling you they’re telling you the truth “that the people in charge don’t want you to know”? Did we forget that research is actually a skill and requires discernment, which is not the same as going down a YouTube conspiracy rabbit hole and becoming cynical and mistrusting of experts? Jesus Christ.

Only a short list of all the ways we get followed around online.

I find myself longing for the early 2000s, when we had just enough technology to be useful, but not overpowering. We could read email and maybe some news, but we had to be on a usually-shared computer to do it. We still needed to make telephone calls and talk to somebody to get most business taken care of. Movies needed to be rented, and unless you had one TV per person in your home, watched together.

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So I’ve decided to back off, and social media (really, just Facebook and Instagram) is the start of that.

It was a sudden decision after seeing a challenging yet nonsensical response on some meme I’d shared, and realizing that it had hooked me immediately. I was mad, and I wanted to waste my precious time fruitlessly responding. Ugh.

Earlier that day, my sister had said, “Does Facebook do anything for you? Do you even get subscribers from there?”

The answer is no. Well, maybe a handful, but not enough to justify keeping Facebook around; after all, their magical algorithms these days don’t show anyone anything that would take them away from Facebook unless you pay them to advertise. And I am not paying them.

While I was at it, I went ahead and deactivated Instagram, too.

Will I still spend too much time on my phone? Certainly, especially reading the news. But I also like to listen to podcasts and audio books while I do chores or work on puzzles, which feels like a half-way house residency.

I’d like to think that cutting out social media is akin to cutting out sugar from one’s diet. Not a catch-all solution, but a big, big help.

And I think other people might eventually do the same. Feeling like a zombie doesn’t feel good.

I’m imagining (hoping), too, that eventually at least some people will turn away from 50-word soundbites and rediscover the joy of reading something — like this Substack — that wasn’t created to sell something or keep people hooked to an addictive diet of outrage.

But hey, I’m not giving my phone up. Everyone I love is in there.

Recommended reading from the Spanish paper El País: From Bannon to Musk: The decade that made misinformation the new normal