Be Smarter Than The Smartphone

Look, I’m well aware that I’m not the first, or even in the first 10,000 people to tell you that you need to throw your smartphone into the nearest body of water and then pee into that body of water, and then drop a bunch of plugged-in toasters in that body of water to make sure everything else in that body of water is dead so that no rainbow trout have to read your dumbass texts.

Or, more realistically, that you should really tone down your phone usage.

My point is that it’s not a new idea, nor is it a one you probably even disagree with.

Right?  I mean does anyone disagree that rely on their phone too much?  I can’t think of a single person I know who has ever said anything to the effect of, “Oh my relationship with my phone?  Totally healthy.  Everything there is just right.  Well balanced.  A-okay.  My life is better because of how often I look at this fucking thing.”

I think most people are like me.  I look at my phone at least ten times a day, and think “Fuck you.  I hate you and all that you do to me.  I want to be free from your pull.  I want to be able to go through life without this electronic pacifier.”

And then of course, every time I’m back within ten minutes (usually ten seconds) vaguely smiling at a Tweet that I’ll forget about and never read again.

I know what it’s doing to me.  We all know what it’s doing to all of us.  We all know that it’s increasing our demand for stimulation to new, previously unheard of heights, meaning our attention span is dwindling down to a nub.  We know it’s forcing a wedge into our relationships.  We know it’s bombarding us with more information than we can literally fathom–never mind know what to do with.  We know it’s separating us from reality, thus making us more anxious and isolated.  We sure as hell know it’s making us judgmental little fucking assholes who spend hundreds of hours more than ever comparing ourselves to our ex’s new girlfriend’s Instagram.  We know we suck.  We know these things are probably ruining us.

We’re positive of all of this, and we’re…dismissive of it.  We accept the realities of our phone addiction with open arms.  Then we escape back into our phones to forget about how awful our addiction to our phones is.

We have these attitudes that just seem insane when you break them down.

“Oh yeah, my husband complains that I neglect him because I’m always on Instagram, LOL.”

“I just spend 45 minutes on the toilet blankly scrolling through Twitter tehehe whoops.”

“I can feel my brain disintegrating with each passing day bwahaha.”

We know it’s happening, and we do nothing.  We just lie back and let the horror of these things wash over us, and ruin our brains.

So maybe we should, I don’t know, stop that?

But how?  How do do we turn the knob on this down until it’s not, you know, devastatingly unhealthy?

First we have to figure out why we’re so accepting of this unhealthy behavior.  I think the answer to that might be simple: we need our phones  And I do mean “need.”

The people who actually try to tell you to throw out your phone are assholes, and they truly don’t live in reality.  Don’t listen to them.  Tell them to fuck off.

Others require you to have a smartphone-level connection with them.  If you don’t, you’ll be less successful workwise in many situations, you’ll lose connections with those outside of your immediate area, and you’ll be out of the loop on the latest with Kylie Jenner’s vagina (or, also, things that matter).

Worst of all, you’ll be that fucking douche who constantly talks about not having a smartphone, and everyone will hate you.

We accept our addiction to our phones for the same reason we accept eating a whole block of cheese.  “Well what are you going to do?  I need to eat something,” or “What are you gonna do?  I need my phone in case my mother is being chased by a bear and wants to call to inform me that she loves me before she’s eaten to death.”

In both cases, you can’t quit your phone cold turkey in the same way you can’t quit food cold turkey.  You need them to be there.  You just need to control how you’re using the thing you’re addicted to.

Here’s how we can do that in some super complex, mind-blowing steps.

A good start to reducing our phone reliance is to force ourselves to not be attached to it at all times.  So maybe we should treat our phones like a fun and necessary thing to own, instead of a tumor grown from your palm that will kill you if you have it removed.

When you can, you need to try just not having it with you sometimes–particularly when the thing you’re about to do is at all worth enjoying.

You don’t need your phone at your friend’s house.  You don’t need it if you’re working on your own project. You don’t need it at the dinner table.  I don’t care how much your family sucks ass.

Leave it within earshot in case something relevant happens.  Otherwise ignore it, and pay attention to the thing you’re actually supposed to be experiencing right now.

You’re often told to “unplug” with your electronics, meaning to stop using them.  The better term is to plug in.  Charge your phone at a wall, and leave it connected there.  Act like it needs to be there.  When you need to use it, stand up while using it away from the group (so you don’t get comfortable), and then leave it to rejoin the reality that’s going on elsewhere.

Treat it like an actual phone and not a newborn baby surrounded by rattlesnakes.  You can set it down and walk away.  And doing so will demonstrate to yourself that you have power over it.

Another way to set up the mindset that this phone isn’t our source of everything that happens to us is to stop making it the source of everything that happens to us.

Consider that maybe you don’t need fucking Snapchat notifications.  Cut it out.  Stop it.   Nothing on there matters enough where you need to know about it right away.  The dick pics can wait, and drunken selfies with the pretty filter that nobody ever enjoys can certainly wait.

You also don’t need notifications of anything that isn’t immediate and potentially important personal messaging.  You don’t need your phone to tell you people like your Tweet.  You don’t need to know someone tagged you in some bullshit.  You don’t need to know some asshole 14-year-old challenged you in a game that’s already a waste of your life.

If it’s not a call or text, get rid of it.  Save your social media time for your…

Nothing is wrong with deciding to look at Twitter for a few designated minutes or to go through your Instagram timeline for five minutes while taking a shit. These things on their own are fine if we’re mindfully and deliberately enjoying them.

The problem is that none of us function this way.  We don’t “decide” to “view” Instagram.  We take a swig from our Instagram flask directly into our brain as the briefest sign of boredom, and then at the end of the day, have no idea why our flask is empty, or our pants are off.

So we need to view social media not as reflex, but as a conscious decision.  There are apps that can help with this, as you can read here, but the important thing here is changing your attitude towards your phone usage.  It’s about deciding to use our phone instead of resorting to because reality is too boring, or nervewracking, or challenging, or lacking in titties.

I recently decided to try to control my phone usage a little, and did something relatively unprecedented in the past few years.  When dragged to a store I didn’t want to go, I sat outside on a bench and just…looked around.  I watched people walk by, I listened to the shitty music emanating from the store, and I observed the chair I was sitting in.  I thought my own thoughts instead of having Twitter-based thoughts shoveled into my head, and I almost even felt like a human being, which is a rare occurrence for my robotic ass.  It was a profound experience.

I’ll say that again: sitting on a bench at a mall was a profound experience.  And that is where many of us are as people.

It’s telling how deep our phones have us when I suggest that you simply exist in the real world instead of phone world sometimes, and somewhere deep down, your reaction is, “Do I have to?”

But this is a crucial thing to do sometimes.  We’re at a point now where, if you just go to a mall or a park and you’re dragged to a store you don’t want to go to, or a conversation isn’t keeping your attention, you whip out the phone like a reflex.

The problem is that the less we exist in the world, the worse we get at it.  We become less and less accustomed to how the world spins around us.  Someday, we’ll notice that #HeyTheWorldIsOnFireAndEveryoneIsDying is trending, and we’ll look up and be completely ill-prepared for it.

We’re getting worse and worse at handling reality because of our addiction to leaving it, so maybe it would be beneficial for us to force ourselves into the bland, challenging, titless existence known as life on Earth every now and then.

We know we have a problem.  We know we’re looking at these Chinese-slave-built glowing rectangles way way more than is good or healthy, and we know we need to cut down on this.

So why don’t we stop saying “lol oh well” like idiots and throwing up our hands, like there’s nothing we can do about it?

Plugging in, and being present, is extremely beneficial.  You can feel it immediately.  You can have immediate pride in yourself and feel yourself becoming stronger.

The machines are already beating us, and they don’t even really have weapons yet.  We’re going to need John Connor to come back in time, and slap a phone out of our hand and say, “Exist in reality, asshole.”

You’re better than this.  You’re more powerful than this thing, and you don’t have to be a dipshit like this. Give a shit about yourself and your mental health.  Allow your brain to get back into shape, lower your stimulation to a level a human can take in, and return to feeling like a real living person who exists in the real world.

Be smarter than the smartphone.