Throw Your Smartphone Into The Ocean
Any body of water will do, really
You should probably get rid of your smartphone. You don’t need it, not really; you’d get by just fine without it. You don’t have to throw it into the ocean, I guess - maybe you live very far from the ocean, or maybe you have an aversion to littering. Even so, there must be 50 other ways to get rid of your phone: sell it to a stranger on Facebook Marketplace; smash it with a hammer; ask a friend to bury it deep underground in a hidden location and then arrange for your friend to be murdered so that the secret of its location is lost forever; wipe all of its data and then leave it unattended in a public place; slip out the back, Jack; make a new plan, Stan; no need to be coy, Roy, and so on.
This will feel very strange at first - the lack of stimuli, the sudden absence of all the world’s available information streaming directly into your consciousness at all times - but it probably won’t be as difficult as you imagine. Importantly, ditching your smartphone does not mean ditching the internet, or technology more broadly; you can still use computers and maintain an email address and participate in video calls and enjoy all the trappings of our digitized modern lifestyle. None of that stuff is necessarily bad in and of itself. The thing that matters here, the real problem, is the constant, prodding connectivity that is basically the entire point of having a smartphone in the first place.
It seemed like a good idea at first, being hooked up to the world like this, the instantaneous access to a real-time feed of everything that could ever possibly matter to you or to anyone. We thought it would help us navigate our lives more smoothly, help us be more informed and efficient and engaged. And there’s a sense in which that’s true - smartphones are capable of making our lives easier in some really obvious and quantifiable ways, and they can do all sorts of extremely valuable stuff.
But the side effects of all that connectivity - my god, the side effects. Just awful shit. Our round-the-clock access to all that news and entertainment and vacuous but inescapably compelling content, it’s just a disaster for everyone’s general well-being, and it is clearly wreaking havoc at the societal level. If we knew, when the whole smartphone thing started, that we would be staring at these devices for an average of almost four and a half hours a day, would we have been so optimistic? That is an unthinkable number, an entire day out of every week - more than a quarter of our waking hours - that we are just completely removed from the world immediately around us.
All that screen time might not be so concerning if the content we were accessing through our phones were more substantive, but in reality the bulk of that time is spent consuming the digital equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, totally artificial and forgettable crap that provides little value outside of helping pass the time, and that is occasionally spiked with some potent ideological poison. This is kind of a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people, and one could easily convince themselves that they are built different, that the multiple hours they spend on their phones each day are actually good and reasonable and constructive. Maybe that’s true for those people, and congratulations to them! There must be dozens of them out there, at least! But if you conduct even a brief audit at what captures most people’s attention online in 2024 - actually look of the sort of content that gets the most engagement - it becomes pretty obvious that it’s almost all junk food1.
Even the stuff that is not plainly awful - your brain games and your educational videos and your brilliant Substack essays written by undiscovered geniuses - are things you could easily access via other means, and without all of the drawbacks of constant connectivity. This is true also of the “productive” things we do with our phones, and especially with regards to work, which smartphones help ensure never really ends. It was not all that long ago that you would physically leave the office (people worked in offices at this time), and then no one would bother you about work until the next morning. If your company was literally burning to the ground you might get a phone call, but for the most part there was a clear demarcation between time dedicated to work and time dedicated to other human activities.
The collapse of that distinction, the way in which work time has totally infiltrated what used to be non-work time, is the sort of subtle but world-altering side effect of constant connectivity that I think most of us did not see coming when Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone - and which is now so ingrained in our culture that most people barely even think about it. Our phones and everything that comes along with them are just part of our lives now in a way that is really hard to overstate, and which becomes glaringly, obnoxiously apparent once you start to cultivate some skepticism about the whole smartphone project.
Whether or not you have cultivated this particular skepticism, the available scientific evidence suggests that you will almost certainly be a happier and more fulfilled person without an internet-enabled supercomputer within arm’s reach 24 hours a day (this is especially true if you are a teenager or, god forbid, even younger). This is the sort of academic consensus that comports with what seems like basic common sense, the equivalent of saying you should exercise regularly and eat less processed food. We all pretty much know that it’s true, but most of us don’t act on that knowledge because an ice cream Snickers tastes better than a salad and sitting on the couch for half an hour is easier than going for a run.
If you want to make some incremental progress in spite of all of this, you could start turning your phone off more often, or tossing it in a drawer for long periods of time, or just use the Do Not Disturb feature on a regular basis. To go a step further, you could delete the apps that account for the bulk of your screen time, whittle your home screen down to the bare essentials: phone, messaging, email*, weather, calculator, etc. Maybe that is a good place to start if you’re not yet ready for the commitment of consigning your phone to the bottom of the sea.
But let’s be honest here, as we attempt to wrap things up - you probably will not do any of this. I probably won’t either, and I’m the person who wrote this whole essay. Constant connectivity is a potent dependency, and many hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to keep all of us hooked. On top of that, it still feels a little bit like a superpower, being able to access a little bit of everything, all of the time. Be that as it may, I can’t help but shake the feeling that it’s making us all kind of sick, on both an individual and collective level, that our smartphones are basically radioactive and are gradually (but not imperceptibly) zombifying us.
Four and a half hours a day - think of what you could do with even half that time back: read an actual book, write an actual book, learn to play the piano, learn to knit, learn to change your car’s oil, visit a friend you haven’t seen in a long time, go hiking, sit still and think about the world, remodel your front patio, get people registered to vote; almost anything you could imagine would be better than what you’re probably doing during all that screen time. You should just get rid of it. The ocean is very large; there’s plenty of room in there.
You can actually perform something like this type of audit right now, in real-time. There’s a whole page on Reddit for exactly this sort of thing: today’s top posts on r/all. I’m confident that whenever you click on that link, the overwhelming majority of what you see will fall into one or more of the following categories: mildly amusing image macros, inane historical trivia, CRAZY videos, political culture war fodder, and what I like to call “judgment porn” (which is primarily comprised of mostly-fabricated stories of bad people behaving badly that always includes a prompt for everyone who sees it share their opinion regarding how badly the bad person has behaved - see AmIOverreacting, relationship_advice, AITAH, and many others). Given that I spend much of my screen time each day consuming exactly this content, I am confident is saying that it is definitely not making me a better or happier or less anxious person, and is in fact probably doing the opposite in all regards.