My awakening moment about how smartphones fragment our attention span

This piece was written as if it had lived a year in my mind.

Every time I take a vacation, I spend much less time plugged into the world. Each time, I come back refreshed and more in touch with myself.

The phone and our collective reliance on them is not healthy. It will take some collective effort for me, and some of my friends, to try to plan events more regularly, in order that I am not feeling the need to have my phone with me so much.

I'm also going to make a few more MP3 discs for my car, which thankfully has a CD player (2014 model).

I can't emphasize enough how important it was for me to read this article. At least I know I'm not alone.

The addictive nature of those devices is exactly why I don't have one, I'll end up with even less time in my life and that's pretty much the only currency you never get more of. It's bad enough with just a desktop/laptop.

I just stuck to my Nokia 'dumbphone' while it still worked and after the last of the networks that it used went dark I switched to the N800, it's not perfect (technically a smartphone, it runs KaiOS), but it still has buttons and I refuse to go online with it (you can't do much on that silly screen anyway). In a pinch it will serve as a mobile hotspot.

Articles like this are interesting for me because I have trouble relating to "feed addiction" and the attention issues often associated with social media. I understand how it gets the way it is and I can imagine how it must feel, but I just haven't really experienced it, and I don't think that it's quite the drug it's made out to be.

My work makes me eager to throw my phone/laptop away as soon as possible; I'm definitely a workaholic and rather dangerously at that, so maybe I'm getting the same result via a different means; but there is almost always a point at the day when I just need to zone out on a dumb show I've watched a ton of times or just take a run with a bit of music or a nice walk and zone out on some music or even just the sounds of the city for awhile.

My work more or less has roped me into social media to some degree for some part of the day, and I really don't like social media at all; I don't dismiss it, it's just not the way I like communicating and because I deal with a lot of awful customers via social media (often fruitlessly) I have a very dour understanding of it as the same communication mechanisms that the awful customers implement are what I see elsewhere. When I do see non-negative/complaining content on social media, it's just not that interesting, and I'm more relieved that it's not some non-sense I have to deal with than I am interested in what someone has to say.

For me, modern social media even makes it easy for me not to get into it. Instagram floods sponsored objects when I just want to go and like my friend's pictures/stories. Reddit kills itself for me with its comment/voting system and the efforts to make it readable in a way I like just isn't worth it for the content I find. Twitter is the best at keeping me out of social media as it actively does its best to ensure I can't read Twitter content without signing up and giving a bunch of information I don't want to give, so I don't even have a chance to get hooked on something before the login modal hides the content. The less said about Youtube and its social media aspect, the better but it's absolutely unintelligible; even trying to follow older conversations (less than a month) is impossible sometimes as there are so many orphaned responses that you can't follow the context of a given answer as it was deleted or hidden somewhere else or someone changed their username(? I'm not sure if this is a thing but it's one of the only other ways I can understand what I see).

I can at least respect TikTok in that you can access everything without an account or even an app, and more or less it's the same experience, but there is so much repeat content that it's just not interesting.

When I want to check something nowadays, I just check it. If I want to go for a walk and just think for awhile, the most distracting thing is just that I'm processing too many projects/problems from the week, and I need to physically move a bit to calm down a bit. Cooking, running, reading articles, taking a crack at some code project, it's calming because it's easy to focus on, and the only challenge I have is just exhaustion most of the time.

Boards games and card games are great too.

This is precisely why I haven’t purchased a smartwatch. These devices decrease our ability to solve problems that require analysis for extended periods of time.