Like maybe everyone in the world right now, it’s hard for me to focus lately. I don’t want to blame it all on my phone, but that is probably the biggest cause or offender of my peace of mind. I’m two sentences into this and I’ve already checked Instagram on it once. Who knows how many other times I will before this article is done?
These devices have become our adult pacifiers. They “help” us in so many ways, only to hurt us in an equal number. They are electronic crack-pipes for those of us who claim we’d never get addicted to a drug. Think it’s not you? Try going without your phone for 8 waking hours once. See how many times you think about it, long for it, or wish you could check ‘just that one thing.’
On Sunday of this week, I was determined to get some time in my backyard hammock before the oncoming stifling heatwave hit on Monday. My wife and kids gave me the hammock for Father’s Day a few years ago, and my first thought was that I’d never use it. Then I tried it out. I was hooked. There’s something about being suspended in air, rocking back and forth, that is a balm for the soul. It’s relaxing, peaceful, and restorative.
Nerd alert: One of my favorite activities while I swing in my hammock is watching the Chimney Swifts as they soar through the early evening sky. If you’re not looking, you’d never notice them as they seem to spend most of their time soaring and eating insects, not landing or hanging out at feeders. For me, it’s a simple pleasure and is calming. It reminds me that life goes on, despite all the rage, busyness, and violence in the world. I know loving a species of bird is an official declaration of being an old fart, but here I am. I love it.
Anyway, it took a conscious effort to focus solely on the birds. There were multiple instances where I checked my phone for texts from my wife or kids, notifications from Facebook or Instagram, or emails from someone evidently more important than the Chimney Swifts overhead. I remember finally catching myself doing it for the fourth time in less than 10 minutes and realized how much it took away from the serenity of soaring birds.
I went from watching a pair flying together synchronously to checking tomorrow’s weather. Because that seemed important.
I went from trying to count how many were in my view at one time to responding to a Facebook notification.
I went from slow breathing and mindless thinking to changing the song on my earbuds. (Confession: the music helped me relax, but still caused the distraction when changing songs.)
On and on I went.
Like a rat pushing the button for a treat in the movies they showed in my Psychology 101 lecture in college.
Like an addict hitting a crack pipe.
Like the compulsive hand washer.
Irealized how mechanical it was. How easily I was pulled to another place, despite swaying blissfully in the comfort of my backyard. How each of those phone checks provided a little dopamine hit and, unbeknownst to me, probably caused a little unknown stress. I realized that if I do this all day, it’s no wonder I’m fatigued.
It’s why I once put the yogurt in the cupboard instead of the refrigerator.
It’s why I went upstairs to get my phone, only to do two other things and forget my phone. (Which is incredibly ironic, if I think about it.)
To add to the distraction factor of my phones the unending stream of grief, world strife, fraud, corrupt politicians, and all-around bad juju it exposes me to.
Colorado is on fire!
The genocide in Gaza and Lebanon is killing children and flattening entire cities!
Data centers, Flock Cameras, Palatin, AI are just surveillance tools!
Great Salt Lake is drying up!
The reflecting pool doesn’t reflect anymore!
And on and on…
I hate to say it, but I preferred life before I knew every atrocity from every country in the world. When we had just newspapers and TV news, we got a limited dose of news and it tended to be objective, not politically slanted and certainly not “entertainment.” Now we get it from 24 News sources, blogs and five different sources of social media (including Substack). Maybe life was better before the need to watch cats on motorcycles, people falling off ladders, and a dude with a metal detector discovering a Civil War belt buckle. Perhaps it was better when I didn’t know what my friends had for lunch/dinner/snack. (I know, I know. Guilty.) I do know that those moments in the hammock with nothing on my mind but the deftly soaring swifts were nothing short of healing.
They were healing my harried life.
The real question is, why do we do this to ourselves? I know that it’s probably not everyone, but it certainly is almost everyone I know. We’ve bought into the rat’s button-treat-button-repeat cycle, and despite attempts to cut back, we keep hitting the button.
The thing is, it’s not just our phones that manifest this madness. I currently have 9 tabs open on my desktop browser, but that’s only because I opened a new one after having one with 13 open. The reason I closed the 13 tab browser was I forgot what most of them were open for. But also to clear my brain for the next onslaught of open tabs. It’s proof positive to me that having access to everything that the internet offers, both good and bad, is not necessarily a healthy option. Sometimes the problem comes into play when I try to shut the multiple tabs of my mind later in the evening. Or, sometimes from the comfort of my hammock watching the birds.
A good example of my distractibility is after dinner when I pick up the book I’m reading and stop every three pages for a phone hit. Why do I do this? It’s certainly not the book’s fault. I think t’s because I’m now hard-wired for distraction. As much as I hate it, I actually crave it. I hate this about myself. How did this happen?
Perhaps more importantly, how do I fix it? Throwing away the phone is not an option. Like most people, I do so much of my daily work on it—emails, banking, buying, information checking, etc. So, barring joining a Luddite community (which sounds appealing some days) what else can I do?
I’ve tried social media fasting, and it seems to help, but as a writer/author/poet, I need to have a social media presence. I know it sounds like a copout, but I find a fair amount of submission sites for my work, and it helps keep me in touch with other writers. To its credit, Substack is at least a healthier version of social media. I find the content and banter engaging and educational.
Like any unhealthy habit, the first step is recognition (and admission of a problem, for that matter.) I am brutally aware of my phone’s control over me. In my defense, I know myself well enough to sometimes nip a new behavior in the bud. I was on TikTok for a few days a couple of years ago and quickly realized how much I cannot handle TikTok. Talk about the monkey reflex! I would go for two hours from one mindless 15 second video mishap to the next. It was the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese of social media. Eat an entire box, not know what you ate, and come away dumber than when you started.
That same way, I quickly discovered that Threads was much the same. It is a weirdly politically driven leftist social media echo chamber that I fell into during my social media Facebook fast. I became a raging maniac on Threads, saying things I had no business saying; shouting into the black hole like millions of other raging maniacs. To what end, I asked? Exactly. Besides, who needs another social media time-suck channel? Certainly not me.
So, my phone path forward with my phone is a combination of an ongoing awareness of how much time I spend on it, and what it is taking me away from. My time in the hammock was a wakeup call. Recognition is the first step. There’s part of me that wishes we didn’t have the overwhelming technology access that we do. But I also realize it’s not going away and it is our job to manage it like adults should.
Yesterday I found out my essay “The State I’m In,” was chosen as first runner-up in the Wisconsin Writers Association “Vintage Wisconsin” Contest. Very exciting!
Big thanks to the judge, Susan Apps Bodily, daughter of renowned Wisconsin author, the late Jerry Apps. I always looked up to his work as something of high standard so this means something a little more. The essay will appear in either a print anthology or an online publication. Congrats to friend and colleague Lisa J Lickel for placing as well!
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