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NYT Reporter 'Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain' (msn.com)
"It's an unnerving sensation, being alone with your thoughts in the year 2019," writes New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose, in an article shared by DogDude. "I don't love referring to what we have as an 'addiction.' That seems too sterile and clinical to describe what's happening to our brains in the smartphone era."
We might someday evolve the correct biological hardware to live in harmony with portable supercomputers that satisfy our every need and connect us to infinite amounts of stimulation. But for most of us, it hasn't happened yet... [S]ometime last year, I crossed the invisible line into problem territory. My symptoms were all the typical ones: I found myself incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies or having long uninterrupted conversations. Social media made me angry and anxious, and even the digital spaces I once found soothing (group texts, podcasts, YouTube k-holes) weren't helping...
Mostly, I became aware of how profoundly uncomfortable I am with stillness. For years, I've used my phone every time I've had a spare moment in an elevator or a boring meeting. I listen to podcasts and write emails on the subway. I watch YouTube videos while folding laundry. I even use an app to pretend to meditate. If I was going to repair my brain, I needed to practice doing nothing.
Another science journalist helped him through "phone rehab," and "now, the physical world excites me, too -- the one that has room for boredom, idle hands and space for thinking." After a final 48 hour digital detox, "I also felt twinges of anger -- at myself, for missing out on this feeling of restorative boredom for so many years; at the engineers in Silicon Valley who spend their days profitably exploiting our cognitive weaknesses; at the entire phone-industrial complex that has convinced us that a six-inch glass-and-steel rectangle is the ideal conduit for worldly experiences...
"Steve Jobs wasn't exaggerating when he described the iPhone as a kind of magical object, and it's truly wild that in the span of a few years, we've managed to turn these amazing talismanic tools into stress-inducing albatrosses. It's as if scientists had invented a pill that gave us the ability to fly, only to find out that it also gave us dementia."
Mostly, I became aware of how profoundly uncomfortable I am with stillness. For years, I've used my phone every time I've had a spare moment in an elevator or a boring meeting. I listen to podcasts and write emails on the subway. I watch YouTube videos while folding laundry. I even use an app to pretend to meditate. If I was going to repair my brain, I needed to practice doing nothing.
Another science journalist helped him through "phone rehab," and "now, the physical world excites me, too -- the one that has room for boredom, idle hands and space for thinking." After a final 48 hour digital detox, "I also felt twinges of anger -- at myself, for missing out on this feeling of restorative boredom for so many years; at the engineers in Silicon Valley who spend their days profitably exploiting our cognitive weaknesses; at the entire phone-industrial complex that has convinced us that a six-inch glass-and-steel rectangle is the ideal conduit for worldly experiences...
"Steve Jobs wasn't exaggerating when he described the iPhone as a kind of magical object, and it's truly wild that in the span of a few years, we've managed to turn these amazing talismanic tools into stress-inducing albatrosses. It's as if scientists had invented a pill that gave us the ability to fly, only to find out that it also gave us dementia."
For others of us, it happened a long time ago. I grew up computing, I met my first girlfriend in a BBS chat way way back in 1993 or so, and the internets are my happy place. Maybe that's the difference?
I find I can still do all of those things happily, but the people around me can't manage any of them. And I'm plugged in more or less constantly.
You're using them wrong. Stop watching stuff that pisses you off.
That would drive me nuts. My memory has always been craptacular, and I'd forget what I wanted to look up while I was thinking about "what else".
How about just selectively omitting the outrage porn that seems to be the big problem for most people? Drop Vice first, bunch of sensationalist wankers. Gawker used to be the big problem, but then HULKAMANIA RULED.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are all NYT reporters this full of themselves? Or is this particular person just pretending because it makes for a more dramatic essay?
TFA author suffers from an issue which I've seen afflict a lot of the Millennial generation - blaming everyone and everything for their problems except themselves. He blames social media, the phone, the engineers who built it, etc.
The problem is you. Lots of us manage balanced lives using our electronic gadgets without being obsessively dependent on them. I forgot to bring my phone with me to work and shopping yesterday, and didn't have access to it until about 8pm. It was a little inconvenient, but no big deal. If you're unable to do that and are going into what are basically withdrawal symptoms when you disconnect, *you* have a problem. And the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Only after you've identified the true source of your problem, is recovery possible. As long as you keep blaming other people and other things instead of yourself, you won't be addressing the true cause of the problem, so you'll never be able to resolve it.
Or, maybe some of us just see the phone as a useful tool, and aren't enslaved by the damned thing.
Seriously, how many "I'm abandoning x technology/platform/company" have we read about in the past few months? Is 2019's theme going to be tech reporters telling us how they unplugged because they don't have the mental fortitude to say "no" to whatever they're breathlessly consuming at the expense of their well-being?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.