If you, the reader, happen to be in public reading this article, put your phone down for a second (feel free to smash it at this point, or just turn it off), and look around. Everywhere, people have bowed heads, eyes fixed to tiny glowing boxes held in their hands. It is disturbing to watch, as if our personal pocket Dementors are slowly consuming every bit of happiness and motivation we have. If a person didn’t know what a smartphone was, it would look like the aliens/AI/enemy had won. We check phones in line-ups, bathrooms, at red lights, and while in conversations with real human beings; the worship continues ad nauseum. Every six minutes. Sometimes more often.

This is an interesting thought to hold when you consider the fact that ‘deep work’ is dependent on entering an extremely focused mental state. A state that takes somewhere in the range of 15-30 minutes to reach. In a society inundated by notifications vying for our attention, this is likely a space that is only reached by a select few. My hack for writing out individualized programming for the gym has always been to just turn my phone off. If I don’t do that, my creativity stalls, and it takes days to get through the programs (also known as I just keep looking at my phone as opposed to actually working). I have often lamented that people don’t understand how hard it is to do creative work on demand. Comically, if you look at my digital hygiene in the past three years, my own understanding of this process is rather suspect. For someone who is supposedly very aware of how bad screen time is, I am surprisingly terrible at regulating my own behavior with a smart phone. I was even lucky enough to grow up in a generation that didn’t have pocket Dementors, where we actually got to learn the discipline of sitting down to read a book. Today, it is not surprising that every second child (and parent) is rushing to be diagnosed with some form of attention deficit disorder? I appreciate that there might be a couple people out there who legitimately aren’t just living out the reality of the holy trinity of caffeine, sugar, and phone addiction, but I am guessing it is the minority.

Focused work is hard. I mean, it isn’t like thinking is comfortable. This is why the ability to sit down and read books without getting distracted is a learned skill. While this shouldn’t be in any way a news flash; focus and intention are hard won skills. They are learned, practiced, and developed. If a person spends every six minutes being distracted from the world around them, it isn’t likely their (in)attention will be improved on. In fact, from high performers to mystics, everyone has pointed out that the path to both creative breakthroughs and nirvana requires being able to focus the mind. This is after all, the point of meditation, breath-work, and mindfulness; to learn to sit and focus the mind on the present moment. Today, all of these practices are attainable — if you get the right app, and likely some expensive fancy tech to help.

However, the real issue here isn’t that nobody is getting any creative work done, it is that we never actually realize just how bored and lonely we are. Most people reach for a phone as a bit of a tick whenever a free moment arrives. Nobody is sitting long enough to get bored anymore, and with the phone masquerading as people, how could one ever feel properly lonely? We are after all, always connected to our social networks. Yet I think this truth is the real monster lurking behind our worship of our digital devices: we are never alone with ourselves long enough to really realize how bored and lonely we are. We don’t want to feel either of those emotions, so we fill in the space before they can be realized.

Derek Muller does a youtube piece on ‘The Value of Boredom’ that is rather good (seven minutes of distraction from the room you are in, if you want to watch it). He starts out describing a classic experiment, where they put participants in an empty room with a table, a chair, and a button. The button, the participants are warned, will shock them painfully if they push it, and then the scientists leave to watch just how long a person can sit with nothing to do. Within a few minutes, the majority push the button as opposed to being alone with themselves (men at a higher rate than women). Derek argues that this study proves how bad people are at being bored. I personally think it highlights just how bad we all are at sitting with our own thoughts. Either way, it is pretty evident that people would rather hurt themselves knowingly than sit still by themselves and do nothing.

This is why phones are great. They let us skip that unpleasant sensation of having nothing to do. Yet, this means that we never actually get motivated to do anything of any real value. We essentially do nothing, but also never reach the natural step of being bored enough to change that state. The April at the beginning of Covid marked the first month I had not ridden a snowboard every consecutive month in seven years. Retrospectively, it also marked a massive increase in my own screen time. Interestingly, even when nature was once again open to us, I found myself complaining of how sick I was of driving. With people flocking to the hills because the bars were closed, it seemed a lot more calm to just stay in town, ride my bike, and get work done. While all of the pieces of my downfall are pretty apparent with a bird’s eye view, it is hilarious to see where those pieces brought me. I wondered aloud this weekend whether my own resistance to driving was just a thin veil to excuse my inability to sink into the boring, screen-free (somewhat) space of driving and heading outside. In an era rife with depression, where people struggle to find a sense of meaning, or really any kind of motivation, screen time is at an all-time high. It seems a bit too coincidental. Everyone feels busy, overwhelmed, and depressed at the same moment in history that we have filled every empty moment with a notification.

After that glance at boredom and inspiration, what about loneliness? You know, the emotion of wanting to see people because one lacks in human connection. Perhaps every time we start to get even a little lonely, we text someone. Or check an app that tells us people like what we do/post/talk about. Twenty years ago we would leave the house and go find a human to talk to. The difference is that talking to the human is actually great for us, while staring at a tiny box to see if a couple dots will appear, or if the word ‘typing…’ will pop up is a very pathetic surrogate for watching a human face smile. It fundamentally isn’t the same. Human eyes are a glorious glimpse into the universe. A picture of them on a glowing box is not the same. Yet, most people will start texting rather than allowing themselves to sit with the uncomfortable fact that they are actually lonely. This means that we aren’t showing up unannounced at our friends’ houses on Saturday mornings anymore, we are too busy staring at our little black boxes.

So I propose a litmus test for whether drastic action is required: do you check your phone at red lights? If you feel the need to check your phone at red lights you are likely addicted to it. Nothing that pressing has happened since the last red light.