When I’m waiting in line to order my drink at a coffee shop, my automatic instinct is to grab for my phone. Not to do anything necessary, of course; just to scroll aimlessly for the minute or two before it’s my turn to order. Maybe I can catch a few tweets, headlines, or Instagram stories.
It’s the same impulse that leads me to grab my phone first thing in the morning, right before I go to sleep at night, and throughout the day as I’m in between tasks. Sometimes I find myself checking an app in the roughly 20 seconds it takes for me to walk from one side of my house to the other. In none of these cases do I have a clear reason or defined goal. It’s just a habit I’ve gradually been conditioned into, as have most of us in the smartphone age: a disturbing Pavlovian impulse to fill every open moment of life with some form of mediated “content.”
The more I’ve become aware of this often unconscious habit, the more it disturbs me. The main problem isn’t that what I find in those snippets of scrolling is largely foolish (though that’s certainly a problem). It’s that the elimination of every last shred of unmediated space in our lives makes us foolish. To become wise, we need emptiness in our days; time to think; space to synthesize; moments to be still; mental breaks. Yet the smartphone era is quickly obliterating these things, beckoning us to fill every spare second of life with something. Click this! Watch this next! Listen to this podcast! The algorithms are designed to commandeer our attention not just partially, but totally. And it’s making us fools. Read More
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