The question that stops your phone obsession

And suggests what you might do instead

Photo by Roman Odintsov on Pexels

Hey there everyone —

I was sitting on the steps of my apartment at sunset when my neighbor stopped by. He sat cross-legged on the path at the bottom of my steps and we squinted at each other across a sunbeam. We were both in a bad mood. Too much work; too much everything else. It was good to be in a bad mood together.

We started talking about work but pretty quickly the conversation turned to email and how we kept checking it. We were swamped, but we kept checking. Even at the end of the day, before we stopped work. My neighbor told me he noticed that his email checking went up, the more overloaded he was. 

As soon as he said it, I realized I did the same thing. I’d never noticed. There was a masochistic quality to it: watching the bright lines of text pile up, unread. More proof I couldn’t keep up. 

Why did we keep coming back?

You’d think we’d focus on completing the tasks at hand and just ignore the new stuff pouring in. Instead, the more hopeless things became, the more obsessed we were with monitoring the flow of new demands. 

A lot of writing about cell phone obsession assumes we check the phone to receive pleasure. Or, we check it to avoid boredom or to assuage social anxiety if we’re alone in a public place. It’s either the direct receipt of pleasure or the warding off of un-pleasure. 

Writing in The Conversation, for example, Andrew Campbell, Senior Lecturer in psychology at University of Sydney, notes that the average cell phone user checks his phone 85 times a day :

Users constantly check their phone, seeking opportunities for a short dopamine reward, or a distraction from boredom or mundane tasks such as traveling on public transport.

The consensus seems to be that we go to the phone to get something better than what’s here now. I haven’t seen much writing about this masochistic aspect of phone usage. Why did my neighbor and I compulsively return to checking our email, making ourselves feel worse, more overwhelmed, less competent? Why do teens who are being humiliated on Instagram stay glued to the screen? There’s a difference between watching someone else’s train wreck and, when it’s us, staying frozen on the tracks. 

Do we compulsively check our phones less for the pleasure of it and more in the vein of middle school paranoia: making sure we still fit in enough to avoid the scorn of the popular kids, enduring the humiliation of finding our sneakers in the toilet (yes that happened to me), reminding ourselves of how we’re supposed to act, so we stand out in the good way but not too much?

I Googled variations of “phone obsession masochism” in the hopes of answering these questions, but all I got were definitions of masochism and Canva squares of S&M. Nothing about phones. 

It’s a few years later, and I’m still trying to answer the question of why my neighbor and I miserably and compulsively kept checking our email, to the detriment of what we actually wanted to be doing. What I came up with in the interim was a way to make myself stop. I started asking myself this question:

What is it that you think you’re going to receive?

What is the email I’m hoping is waiting for me, and what does it say? As soon as I ask myself that question, I can feel the curls of longing, like smoke, that rise up in my chest. I can feel my head turn slightly to the right, like I’m listening for someone. I can feel sparks of electricity in my middle, anticipating a treat.

The question shows me how much I want my email to reassure me. It shows me how much I’m checking because of a fantasy, a wish:

I’ve been invited to do something fancy that will increase my status

I’ve been told money or some other resource is coming my way, so I can feel safe

I’ve been found by someone who might become a new friend or collaborator, or who wants me to help them make a difference in the world

I’ve been told about an exciting adventure I might have and how to make it happen

When I look at those wishes and fantasies, I can see that it’s very unlikely the email I want is there. I can say to myself: it’s not coming. 

Not in a punishing way; just in the gentle way you tell a child there isn’t any cotton candy left. You don’t just yell at a kid when she drops her new ice cream cone on the ground. You help her manage the letdown.

When I ask myself what do you hope is there, I give myself a chance to notice the part of me that actually thinks something great might be there. Because if I don’t, I’ll run back to my email and in addition to fielding a bunch of ordinary expected email content, I’ll be warding off my awareness of my own disappointment. I’ll be distracted by the analytical parts of my mind. I’ll be making a list of the new tasks that showed up.

The feelings aren’t that big a deal. That’s the point. They don’t break through, the way a real disappointment or shock or letdown would. But they’re still there, coloring my perspective. The day has gone from a shiny anticipatory object to a dulled-out shabby copy of the one before.

But because this is all happening just outside our conscious awareness, we can’t remind ourselves that we have the power and the agency to actually address the feelings that drive the return. We don’t have the power to be rich and famous, but we do have the power to ask what the word belonging means to us, and why we feel alone. We can ask when the last time was that we were surprised, or did something spontaneous, or felt ok, even for a few moments. 

We have the power to stop and ask if the feelings of sadness, or loneliness, or envy are really deep in us, or if they were just evoked by what we watched—surface level phenomenon that will quickly fade away.

The speed of information beats the slow work of figuring out what’s underneath. By stopping, we not only give ourselves the chance to notice what’s happening in our minds and bodies as we engage the phone, but also to ask the systems-level question: what are we consuming, and why?

It's clear that one of the fastest and most frequent vectors of “information”—most of which reinforces the dominant cultural consensus—is the phone. By shutting out the quiet aspects of the present, we shut down the space in which to decide. We make it harder to witness and think about what it means to consume the same story about what’s important in the world, or how X kind of people behave, or what to expect in the future, over and over. 

The more we consume the same story, repeated in place after place, the more lulled we can be, believing our future is inevitable and predictable, and thus not open to change. The more we view stories about people who matter, the more we are taught who doesn’t matter. The more we watch scripts of how to be and what to wear and what to do with our resources, the less room we have to ask what it might take to do it differently. I don’t know how to be in constant consumption of the same story and at the same time be surprised, let alone imagine what I might do to create something different.

I’ve had fans blowing everywhere in my house for the last two weeks, to combat the 100 degree heat. Sometimes I hear it, sometimes I don’t. When it breaks through again, I’m surprised by how much effort it’s taken to drown it out. I can hear how loud it is, and then it fades away again. 

In How to Do Nothing, the artist and writer Jenny Odell advocates for the right not to speak, comment, or otherwise produce on demand, because the very act of constantly putting into a public space little comments about what we’re doing or seeing prevents us from being silent. Silence allows new thoughts to percolate and rise up.

If we can sit with the disappointment of not receiving what we wish was there; if we can tolerate the hum of our longing the way we tolerate an angry fan; if we can let the silence be filled with as much uncertainty as promise; maybe then the phone, buzzing in the other room, will seem like a relic, a fossil from time’s past.

Stay safe out there this week—

xo

Rebecca