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For today’s episode, we hopped in our time machine and traveled back to 1998. I was an innocent time. Meg Ryan thought that as an independent bookstore owner, the biggest threat she faced was the fictional equivalent of Barnes and Noble. She and Tom Hanks were on the bleeding edge of technology by owning 15-pound laptops with AOL. And Greg Kinnear fretted over the distraction of solitaire affecting people’s ability to focus – gasp!
As many of you likely remember, solitaire used to come standard with Microsoft Windows. It no longer does, for two reasons. One, you can download it for free from an App Store. But two … nobody cares? The internet is full of moving images and fiery debates and flashing ads and our phones constantly call to us to scroll through the latest Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and news feeds. Just one more swipe to see what’s new. Just one more quick browse. Just one more. And then ONE more after that. We’re all like little kids begging our parents for just one more minute on our video games before we brush our teeth and go to bed. Except now, we carry that temptation around constantly. And there are no more parents to come down as the heavy and cut us off. We’re all on our own to fight off the temptation to keep scrolling and filling our head with useless images and information that has no bearing on our actual lives.
Whew – it’s bleak out there, guys.
In today’s episode, we talked about this constant onslaught of distractions. There are some prominent former employees of Big Tech who have spoken about how dangerous their inventions were and admitted that the express purpose of these apps is to keep people engrossed as long as possible, like slack-jawed automatons. Sean Parker, portrayed by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, and who became a billionaire thanks to his early role in Facebook, has since withdrawn from the company and said :“All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.”
As frightening as that is to read in black and white, it’s also kind of a Captain Obvious comment. Or it should be. We’ve all been on these apps/sites. We’ve all been sucked in. We’ve all been sitting across from a real human being who wants to converse with us and felt the pull to just check out and get lost in the magical, easy, world of our phones again. We should know that we’re being effectively swindled into spending our lives on these devices without our express and informed consent.
Clearly, we’ve come a long way since the days of Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Freecell being the primary pull on our attention. So chill out about the Solitaire, Greg Kinnear. You know nothing. I mean, did you ever go out to dinner and have a friend pull out their laptop to play some solitaire while they were talking to you? Didn’t think so.
So is there any hope shining in this dark sea of shrunken attention spans and the reality of powerfully addictive substances sitting in every pocket in America?
I think the answer is, there can be. But we have to create the hope ourselves. The Batman isn’t coming to save us from this particular villain. (Did you read last week’s post on The Batman? You DEFINITELY did, right?) We have to wrest ourselves free from the pit of distraction and consumerism that calls to us from our phones. There are a few ways to do this.
Option One: The most extreme. Go Team Flip. Get rid of the mythical siren in your pocket altogether. Keep the ability to text and make actual phone calls and nothing else. Basically, join Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox and the rest of the gang in You’ve Got Mail back in 1998 and live in blissful peace … with occasional inconveniences.
Option Two: Keep your phone but set severe restrictions on when/how you use it. Don’t take it into the bedroom with you. Ever. Set time limits on apps like Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, etc. Stick with them. This is harder than it sounds. I’ve personally gone back and forth with time limits and then deleted them then reinstated them then deleted them. This option is great if you can do it, but difficult.
Option Three: Set phone-free hours of the day or entire phone-free days of the week. Put your phone in a drawer and Leave. It. Alone.
Option Four: Find an accountabili-buddy and get someone to help you track your ability to stick with your time limits, phone-free hours, etc. Get help quitting. It is a genuine and real addiction.
Option Five: Do all of options two, three, and four, or some combination thereof.
Option Six: Umm … accept that your mind is being hijacked and your attention span is suffering brutally and your brain is like a small scared animal at the mercy of the vicious taskmaster that is Big Tech.
We’re no luddites. Technology can be incredible and has changed so many lives for the better. But we’re lying to ourselves if we don’t acknowledge the downsides. And most of us are defaulting to Option Six because we just flat don’t have the willpower to even try the other options. So my suggestion to you is to at least give them a shot. See what you can live with, but keep in mind that it WILL be hard. To call us all addicts is no exaggeration. And breaking any addiction takes hard work. So don’t just implement some new restrictions for a few hours or even a few days and then decide it sucks and go back to where you were. Give yourself some time to adjust. Try some new hobbies to fill with your newly freed time. Step out into the bright light of the outdoors and take a walk.
And here’s the incredible news: you’ll be happier for it. Because even though scrolling through our phones is mind-numbing and easy and fleetingly enjoyable, it’s not real FUN. So give yourself a chance to have more fun and leave that pale imitation of it, that cold black brick, behind in the dust.