When smart phones became a thing, I was one of the last of my circle of friends to get one. I was doing an evening degree at the time and I really began to feel that I was becoming an inconvenience to everyone else, especially when it came to collaborating on group projects and stuff like that. I even started having to ask if I could borrow someone else’s phone to do stuff. So in 2013 I went and got myself a new smartphone. I remember at the time thinking “how did I ever survive without this thing”, but I don’t remember becoming instantly addicted to it. Social media apps at the time did exactly what it said on the tin, it was a social place, and a fun place where you only saw what your friends and other things that you choose to be connected to were sharing. The endless scroll wasn’t really a thing. But problems were starting to emerge, researchers were beginning to look into problems with social media use such as the negative effects of social comparison and the need for external validation through getting likes and comments.
I think the hight of social media was before Covid, I know the year 2016 gets talked about a lot. As after that, the algorithm really starts to take over and that was the beginning of the endless scroll of social media feeding you content it thinks you may like. And then it learned how to keep your attention for longer and longer, while harvesting your data and then fed you back distortions of the truth to try a pit certain societies against each other.
About a year ago I realised that I was spending way too much time staring at my phone. At what? I don’t know, just scrolling. So I decided to delete social media off my phone and I only checked it on my computer. This did work, but I just replaced scrolling through social media with news feeds or Youtube on my phone.
Then about six months ago I couldn’t even look at social media on my computer anymore as all as I was seeing was AI generated slop, which is the flood of artificially generated content designed to mislead, manipulate, and keep you scrolling. For me, social media is dead, and AI killed it. So after having a facebook account since 2007, I permanently deleted my personal page. I kept my business account on facebook and Instagram, for now! I also still share some stuff on Bluesky. I don’t do X and definitely don’t do TikTok. I went on TikTok once to see what all the fuss was about. I just went “Hell No”, and deleted it straight away. That thing is a recipe for addiction.
I don’t think one can ever become clinically addicted to social media or phones, but they are a brilliant tool for distraction. Sometimes distraction can be a good thing, like when trying to deal with difficult emotions such as grief. Distraction can stop us being overwhelmed by too much emotion all at once. Instead we can use distraction by slowing the emotion down to give us more time to process it. However, our mind usually tries to take the easy route and becomes addicted to the distraction and never lets us deal with the difficult emotions. These distractions can take many forms such as drugs and alcohol, gambling, busyness, or smartphone use.
I started to really become aware that my phone use was a problem for me. I was spending 1.5 hours on my phone per day. Now, I know what your about to say “Ah here, that’s nothing, sure the average person in Ireland spends 4.5 hours per day on their phone”. Each to their own, but for me spending that amount of time staring at phone that I couldn’t even remember what I was looking at was a problem. 1.5 hours per day is 10.5 hours per week, 546 hours per year, and if I live for another 40 years that’s 21,840 hours going forward.
I wanted to get rid of it, I wanted to go back to when phones were just phones like back in the days of the Nokia’s. But times have moved on, smartphones are now integrated into our lives. We need them for banking, tickets, security verification, using QR codes, etc. etc. You become an inconvenience to everyone else without a smartphone.
The solution came to me while trying to buy a new pair of trial running shorts. Always wanting to have a phone with me just in case something happened while out running I needed good zip pockets on them to hold the phone in place. But phones have gotten so big now that they barely fit into the pockets. I didn’t want to carry my phone on an armband either and even though I sometimes wear a hydration vest with loads of pockets, I only wear that for my long weekend runs. I needed something for my daily runs. As I don’t listen to music while running, a Nokia dumbphone could have still been my solution but I still needed to keep some tech in my life. So then I decided to see if there was such a thing as a tiny smartphone. Turns out there is, and it’s called the Unihertz Jelly Star.
The Jelly Star is just 3 inches in size, which is the same size as a credit card, but still operates the exact same as any other android smartphone. My only fear with it was, was I going to be able to type on it as the keyboard is tiny. Turns out I have zero problems typing with it and it actually fits and feels really well in my hand for single hand use while typing with my thumb.
So when I turned it on, google automatically downloads all the apps I had on my previous phone, so I left them all on there to see how I got on. The only social media app on it was Youtube, and it was probably where I was spending my time on my old phone, there and the google news feed.
I have the phone now just over a month and it’s doing exactly what I wanted it to do. While running it fits easily into a zip pocket and you wouldn’t even know you had it on you. My screen time is now less than 15 minutes per day. I never look at Youtube or the Google news feed as the screen is just too small to be bothered looking at it.
The phone was automatically set up with notifications switched off apart from phone calls and texts. It meant me having to manually check emails, but interestingly I even stopped doing that on my phone and just wait until I’m at my computer to do that sort of thing. I don’t bother ‘googling’ stuff either, if I really need to know something I’ll ‘google it’ later on my computer. This way I’m way more intentional about what I’m doing on the internet.
So have I just swapped out screen time on my phone for screentime on my computer? I don’t think so. My computer desk is my work station, I’m there with intention to do specific tasks. Yes, there is some nights where I will just use the computer to chill and watch music videos, but I always did a bit of that. I have written before about how nature has become a safe place to explore and deal with emotions. There’s a concept in ecopsychology, that was actually borrowed from Attention Restoration Theory, called soft fascination, which was developed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan. Soft fascination is the idea that natural environments hold our attention in a gentle, undemanding way. For example, the flickering of a fire, the movement of water, and clouds moving across the open sky. Unlike the hard, aggressive pull of a screen, nature asks nothing back from you. It doesn’t reward you for engaging and punish you for looking away. It just continues, indifferently and beautifully. I’ve found that this quality creates an unhurried presence which makes it possible to sit with difficult emotions rather than flee from them. My phone offered escape. Nature offers something unique, nonjudgmental company while you face things. It holds you loosely, gives you something to rest your senses on, and in doing so, quietly makes space for everything you’d been too distracted to feel.
Ultan
