So I Went Without My Phone For A Week

The phrase "terminally online" is new, but I've been terminally online for thirty years. 

In 1993 my mom bought our first PC. We had a dialup connection and a super old school AOL account. After a while I was reading posts from various USENET groups and posting in chat rooms. 

As a bullied kid in middle school, the internet was a great relief from the constant hate that I received in the real world. I made friends. Had a few long distance girlfriends, even. It was nice to have people to talk to that weren't calling me homophobic slurs and reminding me that I'm a piece of shit. 

The years passed and I stayed online as much as I could. Even when I was in Iraq I was on the internet as much as possible, using it to escape the hell that George W Bush had decided to send me to. 

I got my first smartphone in 2007. Around that time I also got a Facebook account. And before long the phone replaced my PC as my go-to method of being terminally online. 

Being online kind of sucks now. Well, not kind of. It sucks. In earlier times it was easy to find people who liked the same things you liked. Chat rooms and internet forums were fun and friendly. Nowadays everyone is mean and wants to argue. It doesn't feel like anyone is having a fun conversation. It's now just endless arguments. And that's made it harder for me to socialize in real life, too. When most of your "social life" is spent arguing with assholes, that really shapes your perception of people. 

I've kinda hated social media for a while. A few years back I wrote about how I hated that every time I went on Facebook I just became angry as a stream of negativity was routinely pushed into my brain.

Since then I did my best to minimize my engagement on Facebook as possible. I deleted the app from my phone. I used the DuckDuckGo web browser to check my account on my phone instead (it helps to keep Facebook from snooping on your phone). I deleted nearly every post I ever made and removed myself from just about every photo I was tagged in. 

That didn't help.

To make up for my lack of Facebook usage, I got more active on Twitter and Reddit. People complain about Twitter since Elon Musk bought the thing but it was a shit show long before that. I left after "#chiligate", an online spectacle created mostly by trolls and bots in which a woman was dragged for making her new neighbors a pot of chili. It was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen in my thirty years of being online and that's coming from someone whose seen the "Two Girls, One Cup" video. 

Reddit isn't so bad, but that's not the point. I was still terminally online. It didn't matter what I was doing, I couldn't put down my phone for more than a few minutes. It was affecting my ability to focus so much that I began to wonder if I had ADHD. Even when I was on my phone I couldn't focus on any one thing for more than a few minutes. Watching YouTube videos became hard to do if the videos were more than ten minutes long. I'd be five minutes in and want to check Facebook or Reddit.

You might have noticed that your ability to focus isn't what it used to be, either. Apparently this is a widespread problem. I'll write more on that in a minute.

My family likes to take a camping trip every year and we decided this time we'd go to Niagara Falls, Canada. I decided to leave my phone at home. In the past I'd use camping as an excuse to minimize my phone use, but even then I'd find excuses to go on it. I didn't want that this time. I wanted to be completely without my phone. Some folks call it a "tech cleanse". I called it "living my best 1997 life".

Of course I didn't want to be staring off into space the whole time I was on vacation, so I got a bunch of books from my library to keep me entertained. One of them was, ironically, a book about how we've collectively lost the ability to concentrate and while the book doesn't have social media as the only reason, it's one of the larger ones. I also got a watch so I wouldn't bother my wife for the time every few seconds. I brought an AM/FM radio to listen to music if I wanted. A 1997 life indeed.

I'd like to say that I instantly became more relaxed being without my phone, but that isn't true. I kind of felt stressed about having to constantly cook and then wash the dishes after. Which doesn't sound like a big deal, but considering I had to make daily trips to the grocery store and have to put in work feeding everyone every few hours; that was time I was spending not relaxing. I hate that that stressed me out so badly. 

But I wasn't stressed due to not having a phone. I wasn't feening for the latest updates from Facebook or Reddit. I wasn't craving another pointless argument about politics, or seeing boomers give asinine take after asinine take in the comment section of a Facebook newspaper page. I didn't even miss my phone at all. The only time I wanted a phone was when I had to look up some information about the local area. 

There were a few times we would go somewhere and I wouldn't have a book with me and there would be periods when I didn't have anything to do. I feared being bored before the trip (the fear of boredom is a big reason why I always had my phone on me when I was back at home), but when that happened I just told myself, "I guess I'll be bored now" and turned my brain off. When you're not constantly bombarded with content, you can do that. Just chill out, stop thinking, and let your mind just wander aimlessly. It was easy to relax during those times. 

I also found that reading actual books instead of constantly scrolling has its own meditative feel to it. Unlike social media, books aren't trying to make you angry to keep you reading it. I didn't feel anxious or angry reading my friend's latest book. I just immersed myself in the stories being told. 

When I got home I noticed that I was able to focus on things better. I won't pretend that I was cured of all of my issues regarding focusing, but I felt like I was on the right track.

Unfortunately after being home for almost two weeks and I'm starting to fall back into the same habits. The mindless scrolling and arguing about politics has begun again. I started bringing my phone back to bed because I need to keep track of the time and that's caused me to constantly check it when I'm cuddling with my wife and watching movies. Today I turned off my phone and chucked it across the room just so I would stay off of it (which got a few raised eyebrows from my family, lol). I was struggling to stay off my phone that fucking badly.

I'm going to do a few things to help me. For starters, I'm going to get an alarm clock so I don't have a reason to keep my phone by my bed. I'm going to buy a KSafe to keep my phone during times when needing my phone will be a low priority. I get books from the library so I can read instead of scroll. 

Sadly, I know that all the things I do are going to be a half measure at best. Individual solutions don't solve systemic problems, and we have a systemic problem.

I'm sure many of you have noticed that it's getting harder to focus these days. And social media, while not being the only reason, is one of the bigger ones. Studies have shown that our attention span has been rapidly decreasing over the past decade. And it's not just as simple as getting off our phones. We have to admit that that ship has pretty much sailed. We're not going without our phones or social media anymore than we're going without the radio.

Social media is designed to be addicting, and that's a problem that a lot of people aren't talking about. I remember around 2015 seeing a video on YouTube (I couldn't find the video, so I'm going by memory) of a guy being interviewed that said that people are addicted to their phones because every time a notification ding goes off, "it's a dopamine hit". He made it sound like being addicted to social media is a personal failing, like you're an asshole for wanting dopamine (news flash: we all want dopamine).

There's a thousand stories like that. Talking about all the studies done that show that social media is affecting our mental health and ability to focus, and almost all of them are treating it as a personal problem instead of a widespread, systemic issue.

While on vacation I read the latest book from Johann Hari called "Stolen Focus". For those of you who have read my work here over the years, it was Johann Hari's book about depression that I wrote several posts about back in 2019. He wrote a lot about how social media works in this new book.

The truth is that every time you browse social media or Google, there's a team of a hundred people monitoring you. Their job is to make sure that you're using their product as much as possible. And this is because they need to make sure you're watching as many ads as possible. 

Google and the big social media apps like Facebook and Twitter have numerous tools to keep you using their products as much as possible. And they do this because of their advertising tools.

When you first get an account on Google or the social media apps, they start out having an image of you as a random person. Just an expressionless person with no personality. As you continue to use their product, they notice what you like and put it into an algorithm meant to give you ads for things that you're most likely to buy. Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff gave a name to this advertising system: Surveillance Capitalism. And if you wonder why ads feel like they're listening in on you or reading your mind, it's because the algorithms used for surveillance capitalism are so goddamn good at making targeted ads that they've begun to predict what you'd want to buy in the future.

Two days ago I saw a local news story on my television saying that AI may be able to read minds. I wanted to scream at my TV, "WE'RE ALREADY THERE!"

Any time you're not using the internet, you're not looking at ads. So these companies do everything they can to make sure you're staring at your phone as much as possible. That's why staring at your phone on social media is so fucking addictive.

Have you noticed that Gmail on your phone no longer has a "mass delete" option? Or that the social media sites have infinite scrolling? Or why you have to work to make sure your apps don't give you push notifications? It's because they want you to be using their product as long as possible.

If we want to stop being so addicted to social media, we're going to have to collectively petition the government to get involved. That means make it a point to call your members of congress and tell them to end surveillance capitalism. And for those of us cynical fucks that don't think that can work, Europe has already done it. 

We have the power to get the fuck off our phones and get our attention spans back, but only if we accept that what's happening to us isn't a moral failing on our part. We're being deliberately fucked over by corporations and we need to stop them together.