Thanks Ted. One of the best things I ever did, probably 5 years ago now, is turn off all notifications on my phone. It’s hard enough to pry oneself away from apps which have spent billions in R&D to keep you there - but to allow them to beckon to you via a nudge like a notification seems rather silly.
The other thing which helped is to keep all social media apps off the Home Screen. You might open your phone to use the calculator, but the little red dots reminding you to check in, can be difficult to resist - so move them off entirely.
Finally, if/when you open the apps, do so consciously, with a set time in mind to allocate. Once the time is over, wrap it up. This can be difficult, as you’ve already explained- but maybe set a limit on the app and if you want to be more ruthless, ask a partner or friend to set the parental limit passcode 😂
I work in an art gallery and we not only ask folks to refrain from taking photos and making calls in the gallery (duh), we ask them to put the phones completely away and not even have them in their hands. For any reason they can think of. If phone use is needed, do it outside. I get the same reaction as asking a smoker for their cigs. Same exact. Some folks absolutely cannot manage just taking a 15 minute break from the phones. Cannot do it. It's amazing.
With regards to immersive experiences in music, I will highly recommend just listening to an album - ANY album - from start to finish instead of just the "good songs".
This can of course be hard to do, when the skip button and a new song is right there in front of you, but if you can find away around that, you are on the way to a better relationship with tech.
Ever since Facebook introduced a TikTok like feature called Reels, it's captivated me. And especially when my brain is tired from my writing, I've been sucked into wasting hundreds of vain hours going from one little clip to another to another and another. In the Reels coma, I compulsively watch clips from TV shows that I never would have watched. (I don't even watch TV.) I watch clips that tout mineral oil as a miracle . . . Some of the interest is anthropological: How can these people waste their time thinking about these things they are filming (ignoring my own time wasting)? How can they make recipes hat would make you sick if you ate them? Years ago, I had another struggle with certain online games, that I would sometimes play all night long, which I finally beat. There really is a "they" out there, and they are inventing new seductions all the time. The problem is real.
I remember reading a while back about a person who, before he went on the internet in any capacity, wrote down on a piece of paper what he was going online for. He'd cross things off like a checklist and then log off.
At that time, I thought it was a little nutty, but in the years since, it's increasingly wise. I don't do it every time, but having a clear sense for why I'm logging on and what I'm logging on to accomplish helps me to remember the technology is supposed to be there as a tool to help me with an intended purpose or task.
I knew for me it was getting out of hand. I called rotting my brain. I made the decison to do a social media fast and logged out of my accounts. I really do not miss it. I find myelf enjoying other activities and not wasting my day. The fast was supposed to last a week, I am on week 4.
I appreciate your article and how it is a growing problem and it's very real.
We left the city about 6 years ago (when it was still affordable to buy a couple acres). There is just too much to do, and no time to waste it “scrolling”. The beauty of life is in the mundane - feeding the chickens, picking the weeds, learning extreme patience through watching the carrots grow, throwing a ball to the dog. We figured out how to live on one income (mine, a remote-worker, secretary), and I have to tell you - it is a blissful life. You figure out how to be content with what you have. Please put the phones away, there is so much to do!!
1. Audit your day. Write down everything you do, no matter how small. Then, go to your devices, and list the ones you used that day. Finally, look at your usage history of those devices. Write down all the apps you used.
2. Write down all activities and apps used into one column. Create three on the right beside this one labeled "reality," "technology" and "dopamine." Make a check mark beside each activity to indicate what kind of activity it is.
3. Look at your list. Lopsided? Look back at the "technology" and "dopamine" ones, and ask how you can do an analogous activity in reality. Some examples:
Instagram -> photo walk
LinkedIn -> Go see a talk, or speak with a colleague in-person
Video games -> Convert to couch multiplayer to play with friends in the same room
Spotify -> Vinyl
It's not practical to never use these apps or do these technology-aided activities again. The point is to get some direction as to how to mix it up for the sake of your humanity.
This Edward Abbey quote is long, but it is spot on. Substitute “cell phones “for desk calculators”.
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
Also: learning the names of the trees/flowers/plants that you encounter every single day is a fantastic way to combat the tendency to be a Screen Zombie. I call it "Considering the Lilies" in this short piece https://shannonhood.substack.com/p/considering-the-lilies
In addition to dopamine addiction to scrolling, I think there is also a dopamine addiction to arguing in comments and some folks throwing stones at the people struggling with scrolling are living in some shiny glass houses.
I use tech. It's a tool. A very useful tool but it's a means to an end not an end in and of itself. I use it for accessing the goods and services that are of use to me in my real life. Then I put it to one side and go outside and listen to the birds sing.
> But my goals here are very limited—we can’t change the world.
Wrong!
> So I am speaking to you person-to-person about what we can change in our own lives.
That's how you change the world. When some of us change ourselves, the world changes. The change overall may be small but everyone who changes represents a change in a part of the world.
I often find I need to make this point and it's weird for me since it seems so obvious. "We can't change the culture here." and I reply "Yes, we can. When you and I change how we behave, the culture has changed."
So much right on the mark. I agree with your suggestions, most of all the one about cultivating skills in the real world. And playing an instrument, even if only as a basic amateur - but one that responds to body motions; programming music doesn't do it.
For my online life, I've just followed my intuition. When social media (Fb and the rest) came up and became big, I had a look and viscerally rejected it. So I just keep browsing the web as if social media had never been invented. No X, no Fb or Insta or TikTok. No feeds at all, and no recommendation systems (with one exception below). I read a bunch of substacks but treat them like old fashioned blogs, and I get them via RSS. Feedly (RSS reader) is my daily hub to find what's new in the places I've chosen to sub. Discovery goes the slow old fashioned way, via links from one author to another.
The one exception is Youtube, which I use only for music and talks on specific subjects. I regularly discover music thru YT suggestions, but the cardinal rule there is: autoplay off.
It won’t be feasible, affordable or even desirable to some but one way to reduce news based doomscrolling etc is to mostly limit current affairs consumption to reading a good old fashioned newspaper/magazine (for all their faults). The medium feels a lot calmer and is obviously without the addictive properties of a smartphone whatever.
Thanks Ted. One of the best things I ever did, probably 5 years ago now, is turn off all notifications on my phone. It’s hard enough to pry oneself away from apps which have spent billions in R&D to keep you there - but to allow them to beckon to you via a nudge like a notification seems rather silly.
The other thing which helped is to keep all social media apps off the Home Screen. You might open your phone to use the calculator, but the little red dots reminding you to check in, can be difficult to resist - so move them off entirely.
Finally, if/when you open the apps, do so consciously, with a set time in mind to allocate. Once the time is over, wrap it up. This can be difficult, as you’ve already explained- but maybe set a limit on the app and if you want to be more ruthless, ask a partner or friend to set the parental limit passcode 😂
I work in an art gallery and we not only ask folks to refrain from taking photos and making calls in the gallery (duh), we ask them to put the phones completely away and not even have them in their hands. For any reason they can think of. If phone use is needed, do it outside. I get the same reaction as asking a smoker for their cigs. Same exact. Some folks absolutely cannot manage just taking a 15 minute break from the phones. Cannot do it. It's amazing.
With regards to immersive experiences in music, I will highly recommend just listening to an album - ANY album - from start to finish instead of just the "good songs".
This can of course be hard to do, when the skip button and a new song is right there in front of you, but if you can find away around that, you are on the way to a better relationship with tech.
Take a walk in nature without your phone and you might be surprised at how much is going on.
Ever since Facebook introduced a TikTok like feature called Reels, it's captivated me. And especially when my brain is tired from my writing, I've been sucked into wasting hundreds of vain hours going from one little clip to another to another and another. In the Reels coma, I compulsively watch clips from TV shows that I never would have watched. (I don't even watch TV.) I watch clips that tout mineral oil as a miracle . . . Some of the interest is anthropological: How can these people waste their time thinking about these things they are filming (ignoring my own time wasting)? How can they make recipes hat would make you sick if you ate them? Years ago, I had another struggle with certain online games, that I would sometimes play all night long, which I finally beat. There really is a "they" out there, and they are inventing new seductions all the time. The problem is real.
I remember reading a while back about a person who, before he went on the internet in any capacity, wrote down on a piece of paper what he was going online for. He'd cross things off like a checklist and then log off.
At that time, I thought it was a little nutty, but in the years since, it's increasingly wise. I don't do it every time, but having a clear sense for why I'm logging on and what I'm logging on to accomplish helps me to remember the technology is supposed to be there as a tool to help me with an intended purpose or task.
I knew for me it was getting out of hand. I called rotting my brain. I made the decison to do a social media fast and logged out of my accounts. I really do not miss it. I find myelf enjoying other activities and not wasting my day. The fast was supposed to last a week, I am on week 4.
I appreciate your article and how it is a growing problem and it's very real.
We left the city about 6 years ago (when it was still affordable to buy a couple acres). There is just too much to do, and no time to waste it “scrolling”. The beauty of life is in the mundane - feeding the chickens, picking the weeds, learning extreme patience through watching the carrots grow, throwing a ball to the dog. We figured out how to live on one income (mine, a remote-worker, secretary), and I have to tell you - it is a blissful life. You figure out how to be content with what you have. Please put the phones away, there is so much to do!!
Here's an exercise I developed thanks to Ted.
1. Audit your day. Write down everything you do, no matter how small. Then, go to your devices, and list the ones you used that day. Finally, look at your usage history of those devices. Write down all the apps you used.
2. Write down all activities and apps used into one column. Create three on the right beside this one labeled "reality," "technology" and "dopamine." Make a check mark beside each activity to indicate what kind of activity it is.
3. Look at your list. Lopsided? Look back at the "technology" and "dopamine" ones, and ask how you can do an analogous activity in reality. Some examples:
Instagram -> photo walk
LinkedIn -> Go see a talk, or speak with a colleague in-person
Video games -> Convert to couch multiplayer to play with friends in the same room
Spotify -> Vinyl
It's not practical to never use these apps or do these technology-aided activities again. The point is to get some direction as to how to mix it up for the sake of your humanity.
This Edward Abbey quote is long, but it is spot on. Substitute “cell phones “for desk calculators”.
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
Edward Abbey
Also: learning the names of the trees/flowers/plants that you encounter every single day is a fantastic way to combat the tendency to be a Screen Zombie. I call it "Considering the Lilies" in this short piece https://shannonhood.substack.com/p/considering-the-lilies
In addition to dopamine addiction to scrolling, I think there is also a dopamine addiction to arguing in comments and some folks throwing stones at the people struggling with scrolling are living in some shiny glass houses.
I use tech. It's a tool. A very useful tool but it's a means to an end not an end in and of itself. I use it for accessing the goods and services that are of use to me in my real life. Then I put it to one side and go outside and listen to the birds sing.
> But my goals here are very limited—we can’t change the world.
Wrong!
> So I am speaking to you person-to-person about what we can change in our own lives.
That's how you change the world. When some of us change ourselves, the world changes. The change overall may be small but everyone who changes represents a change in a part of the world.
I often find I need to make this point and it's weird for me since it seems so obvious. "We can't change the culture here." and I reply "Yes, we can. When you and I change how we behave, the culture has changed."
So much right on the mark. I agree with your suggestions, most of all the one about cultivating skills in the real world. And playing an instrument, even if only as a basic amateur - but one that responds to body motions; programming music doesn't do it.
For my online life, I've just followed my intuition. When social media (Fb and the rest) came up and became big, I had a look and viscerally rejected it. So I just keep browsing the web as if social media had never been invented. No X, no Fb or Insta or TikTok. No feeds at all, and no recommendation systems (with one exception below). I read a bunch of substacks but treat them like old fashioned blogs, and I get them via RSS. Feedly (RSS reader) is my daily hub to find what's new in the places I've chosen to sub. Discovery goes the slow old fashioned way, via links from one author to another.
The one exception is Youtube, which I use only for music and talks on specific subjects. I regularly discover music thru YT suggestions, but the cardinal rule there is: autoplay off.
It won’t be feasible, affordable or even desirable to some but one way to reduce news based doomscrolling etc is to mostly limit current affairs consumption to reading a good old fashioned newspaper/magazine (for all their faults). The medium feels a lot calmer and is obviously without the addictive properties of a smartphone whatever.