I realized my brain belongs to my phone

It came to a point (for HN and RSS readers) where I would check articles every hour. It culminated with me mindlessly clicking article links, reading the title, scrolling through it (not reading), just familiarizing myself with single words passing through my hyper short attention-span, and getting a "feel" for what the article looked like. It was quite a scary when I did this one time for 30 minutes not remembering anything I have "read" whatsoever.

I am still struggling with this a bit but I am more aware now and try to be mindful of what I read. A neat trick I have found is to try to just check once a week using the search tool (popular past week):

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=&query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...

I fail at this quite often, but a weekly mindful check is what I am aiming for

I know several families (some with teenagers!) who traded their iPhones for dumb phones, reducing usage to much like a phone behaved in 2005; entirely for phone calls that actually matter, and the simplest of brief text messaging. They all have reported it to be a very positive experience.

Alerts, notifications, badges, social media, apps, vibrations, chimes, dings, rings, virtually all of this is generated from entirely inconsequential noise, distraction, and interference. How do you measure the impact on humans of being interrupted all day long by your phone chiming every 5 minutes with a new email, mundane message, social media trash, or nonsensical alert from some app to come fiddle with it and be force fed a few dozen ads in the process? None of this is good for the human mind or psyche.

I find myself (mis)using my smartphone a lot more when I‘m down or exhausted. It’s a refuge, and it’s not a good one, just like your random drug. Browsing around past midnight leaves me feeling empty and my sleep quality suffers a lot. Fight with my wife? Go browsing. Kids are little devils and I can’t escape physically? Yep, check the feeds.

If I‘m feeling well (which is the case most of the time, thankfully), I can go the whole day without opening FB, or even the mail client.

Apart from the social isolation that smartphones bring with them, I‘m also worried about:

- How the constant suckling at the dopamine teat messes up our grasp of what is important and what isn‘t

- and how past-sundown-browsing can destroy your mood [1]. Those screens are comparatively dim for a light source, but they are also the only ones you point directly at your retina for hours on time. And I BET they will find even more dire consequences of unbalanced blue light exposure (vs full spectrum, ie including infrared light which has a restorative effect on retinal cells).

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5299389/

I would add Netflix to the list. In my social circle, people keep watching episode after episode and just feel a compulsion to "finish" the series even the quality is sub par and degraded. I have been there and uninstalled netflix years ago. The series always start out well and then degrades to the point where you are just addicted and cannot help watching since you are already vested at that point.

I realized this as well. On my to-do list is to build the "Difference Engine". The Difference Engine does the following:

- When you go to a website the response of the request is saved.

- When you go to the website again, the new response of the request is saved and compared to the previously saved version.

- Finally, when you go to the website a third or subsequent time, the Difference Engine is invoked, which uses some sort of easing function in addition to calculating the "difference" between the responses.

- The point of all of this is that similarity between responses will result in some response, let's call it 704, which says "hey, nothing has changed, cut it out."

- The Difference Engine could be saved, resulting in near instant results, telling you nothing has changed. This saves you time, but more importantly, will slowly wean you off the site in question.

- This is implemented via a VPN, so there's nothing to install.

Basically, the point of the Difference Engine is to instantly tell you to stop if nothing meaningful has changed. The hope is that you'll stop checking so much as you realize nothing changes usually.

Feel free to steal this idea, hah.

I could have written this exact article. My phone died a couple of weeks ago. I can't accurately convey how unsettling it was to realize how to deeply into my subconsciousness my phone had ingrained itself. Any time there was the slightest lull in stimulation, I found myself reaching for it. I kept carrying my phone with me even though I knew it was dead.

The first night, I was cooking dinner. Once I had everything going on the burners, I had a few minutes to kill. Normally I'd reach for my phone, but I couldn't. After a while, I got bored so I went ahead and did the dishes. Instead of leaving that chore for later and adding to my stress I got on top of it. Better, it required no willpower to do so since I was bored and literally had nothing better to do.

I've felt for years that the days were too short. It turns out they got shorter because of all of the accumulated minutes sucked into my phone. The days felt longer, more relaxed. It was easier to get the minutiae of life done during the between-times. I wasn't irritated by the kids interrupting me. I read more.

At the same time, I really missed the practical aspects of my phone. Listening to the radio while driving sucked. Not having navigation — I have essentially no sense of direction — was a nightmare.

I have a phone again now, but so far I haven't installed any of the consumptive apps on it. (For me that was mainly Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.) It's been good so far. I do find myself sometimes missing the ability to share things on those platforms. If there were write-only versions of those apps, I'd install them and then only consume on my laptop which is a little more naturally self-limiting by not being easily carried around.

A while back, I rewatched the original Alien. One thing that struck me, watching it with modern eyes how all of the characters constantly smoked. When the movie came out, that helped the characters look natural and believable. Now it just looks gross and distracting. I believe strongly in a few decades, we'll look back on phone use today in the same way.

At least, I hope we do. The scary alternative is an entire populace constantly drugged by our own dopamine receptors triggered by carefully engineered cognitive manipulation.

If you want to significantly reduce your phone usage, consider Apple's $349 iPhone: the iPhone SE.

The iPhone SE is just as secure as other new iPhones. It runs all the latest apps. However, the screen is tiny. This makes it a pain to use for long periods of time. Plus, it only has 32GB of storage. It's impossible to install a lot of apps on it. It's also the most pocketable iPhone.

In some ways, the iPhone SE is the perfect smartphone.

I have a hard time relating to these kinds of critiques. I limit my phone's notifications pretty severely. My phone only bothers me for texts and calls, period. Those are usually human beings I know who want my immediate attention, so I want to be bothered. Everything else just waits until I feel like checking it.

I think the difference for me might be that I haven't posted frequently on social media for many years. That does create a kind of compulsion to see how people have reacted and commented. You're putting yourself out there to be judged and I found that very stressful and eventually just stopped.

For me the most important first step is to turn off any notification that consistently gets my attention, but doesn't provide value.

The book called Deep Work by Cal Newport looks at this same idea in detail. If you've noticed that smart phones and shallow content are affecting you as they did this article's author, I recommend it as a resource for reclaiming that lost time.

This is a real problem that I try untangling myself for many months. I have zero phone addiction but my work requires that I sit by the computer and often use browser for documentation. Which makes limiting distractions a lot harder.

I did limit distractions a lot (compared to what I did before) HN being one of the few rare sites I visit. I am not at all happy with google addiction, that may be biggest problem that is less visible than HN or Reddit.

I have dealt with this off and on for years. My relationship with my smartphone has always been love/hate. I actually even did go to a dumphone for several months and enjoyed the disconnect, but the lack of maps and a camera ultimately sent me back to the smartphone.

Now I try to swap SIMs over to a dumbphone for vacation every summer and go to remote places for other trips where there just isn't any cellular service. Nothing like being so disconnected you have to walk 15 minutes to the nearest landline phone.

Edit: I am curious, as an engineer, what others are doing from an on-call perspective when it comes to no smartphone. PagerDuty handles SMS alerts nicely and I'm starting to explore Slack/IFTTT. Hangouts is a big missing piece. There are just a few things like that where I'm concerned about being too disconnected.

I completely agree with this article, and the parallels I draw from it (and some of the comments here) are extremely close.

But why is it that I read this article, agree with it, yet then continue scrolling HN or FB 2 minutes later? How can I get out of this dopamine cycle?

I'm really happy using a non-smartphone.

It's super cheap ($30), monthly costs are very low, it comes with unlimited calls, unlimited texts, holds a charge for 3-4 days (even after 3 years of use), has a nice slide out keyboard for tactile typing and is a lot smaller than most smartphones.

For on occasion maps when I travel I have a cheap smartphone that I pay for on demand ($20 for more than enough data for a long trip) and it works great for listening to offline MP3s while I walk / run. The camera is meh, but it gets the job done.

Basically, I carry the non-smartphone all the time except for when I'm walking / traveling because I like either absorbing nature or listening to podcasts with the other phone.

I have been bogged by this for a long time. I would spend hours jumping from twitter to HN with some TV Shows inbetween. So I decided to take charge by deleting twitter, only going through HN in the night and watching TV only on the weekends. I couldn't ditch HN, I have become a better programmer because of it(I even tried HN subscription programs but those seem to select articles based popularity...I am not one for that). Regardless I will still suggest that anyone having this issues first detach completely. It took a lot of time and discipline to get used to the new schedule.

I've managed to limit my "phone time" significantly since a few years now. Other than the traditional remedies, one thing which works exceptionally well for me is that I've put the device on silent and on vibrate at all time, unless I'm explicitly expecting a very important call (rare). The main reasoning behind this is that auditory signals are much more distracting than visual signals; the latter you must explicitly look for. I just occasionally glance to check the flash notifier. The phone stays out of my hand most of the day.

Is there a market for a screenless phone with voice interaction only (which would not obviate at all many usueful apps "texting", maps, note-taking, etc, btw) -- I know for certain that I would replace my iPhone with (a sufficiently designed) one.

Who else would?

One shock-therapy that at least had some benefit for a lot of my friends: Whenever you feel tempted to get out your smartphone in a public place, survey how many people around you are glued to their smartphones. Talk to the few who are not.

The problem here is the narcissistic viewpoint. It's all about the author, their usage patterns, and their device problems. There's no mention of being part of (or missing out on) social debates or discussions. The author also doesn't mention any online clubs, teams, or groups which would miss them. Are they just bouncing off the front page of each site for a quick dopamine rush?

This reminds me of someone who goes to college and never joins any clubs, then comes home and complains that college is a waste of time.

Edit: suddenly, this seems reminiscent of the Inbox Zero initiative from years ago.

  > and deleted the following apps: Twitter, Hacker News
  > Hacker News

How does one “delete the Hacker News app”?

And your phone belongs Facebook (or so they seem to think)

The whole situation with attention economics is very illustrative of the neglected power of small things. Facebook can't really hack your dopaminergic pathways, however much they improve their feed AI. AdSense doesn't brainwash you to be a consumerist drone. Smartphones aren't exactly subtle with notifications, and it's easy to disable them. There's no violent, obvious infingement of one's agency, so the opinion that you still make your free choices is not without reason. But more often than not, people don't actively counteract these influences. They go with the flow, they allow the scales to be tipped a little. The more they do so, the more suspectible to distractions they become: that is, less prone to consciously deciding if the next stimulus is worth responding do. So even the tiniest starting amount of influence, as long as it isn't annoying and doesn't raise any internal alarm, is a seed of a serious behavioral change. This is how vulnerabilities work: it's not always intuitive that some small hole can compromise an entire system which is otherwise robust and adaptive. But you don't argue that this is pathetic, you go and patch it before the damage is done. Hard to do with humans.

On a more practical (if unrelated) note, I think all browsers should block website notifications by default, i.e. when you get a prompt about push notifications, Deny button has to be highlighted. And it shouldn't be ever shown on mobile.

I found magazines to be a good way of slowly building your attention span back up from basically nothing. The articles are usually short enough that you don't get bored and start reaching for your phone, but they're long enough to require some effort if you want to stay focused.

My favorite so far is Lapham's Quarterly.

Only if you let it.