The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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I hate seeing iPad kids in public, and think giving a minor a smartphone is only marginally better than buying them a box of fags. I saw a note on Substack the other day that pointed out that lots of parents (or prospective parents) are concerned about their children becoming addicted to their phones, but this is blatantly hypocritical when the parents themselves are addicted to their phones. Children are imitative: if they see their parents staring at their phones all day, they're going to want to do the same.
I take this seriously, and it's indisputable that my fiancée and I spend far too much time looking at our phones. Rather than trying to address it after having children, we want to get ahead of the problem. To that end, I ordered this phone lock box from Amazon, which arrived yesterday. You simply pop your phone inside and set a timer, at the end of which it will open. We have pre-committed to not looking at screens of any kind for at least one hour (preferably more) every evening: no phones, no laptops, no TV. (Obviously our laptops don't fit inside the lock box, but for that we have each other to keep ourselves honest.)
The box arrived yesterday evening, and as soon as I returned from the gym I put both our phones inside and set the timer for an hour. It also occurred to me that I could leave our phones inside overnight, so that our phones wouldn't be the first thing we see when we wake up in the morning. This turned out to be a fortuitous decision, as last night I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep, but had no choice but to read my book for an hour rather than looking at my phone. It's only been one day, but so far I think this was a wise purchase.
I still consider people obsessed about minimizing their screen time to have a minor to major skill issue.
A computer, especially a handheld one, is a convenient portal to the sum of human knowledge. Some of my friends live in there. Like, do something useful with it.
I have had days of 12-14 hour screen-on times, and I managed 8 hours 45 minutes today, as of the time of writing before bed. That represents a less than maximally busy day at work followed by a lazy evening. Apparently I used my phone while walking for 1 hour and 44 minutes.
I do not consider this wasted time. Were there things I could have done instead that could, theoretically, have benefited me more? Yes. But I wasn't going to do them just because I didn't have a phone. You try preparing case based discussions and reading NICE guidelines all day. I wrote important emails, used AI to make my life easier, used AI to make other people's lives harder, entertained myself, and got things done, in general.
Nobody in 1995 would have looked at a person spending two hours reading, an hour writing letters, an hour listening to music, an hour navigating around town, an hour talking to friends and three hours using a computer and concluded: nine hours of device time, catastrophic. The figure sounds alarming only because we've collapsed a dozen activities into one dogshit metric based on the substrate they happen on. By the same logic you could work yourself into a panic about somebody's "paper time".
I also have strong doubts about the nominal harmfulness of "screen time" for children. I spent my childhood reading like my life depended on it, because I was bored to fuck. I spend my adulthood reading because I'm often bored to fuck too, except it's on my phone. I also write essays on the bus and in the loo, put on tunes, do useful work, and maintain social relationships with it. The only reason your kids won't end up doing the same is because we might end up with something better.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0506-1
My recommendation:
Don't optimise children's screen minutes. Optimise what they're doing, what they're not doing because of it, and whether they can disengage from it.
I'd say that phones have made my life considerably better. Getting absolutely bored in the year of someone's lord 2026 is the biggest skill issue there is. And God knows I do a lot more IRL than I often used to. They're not mutually exclusive.
"Here's the weights. Do something useful! Better yourself! Why are you complaining that they're right next to this table full of drugs, porn and video games? Just git gud and ignore the temptation, scrub."
Willpower likely follows a similar distribution to IQ (albeit, much more trainable). Most people here are also high willpower people, who don't grok that there's a difference. Personally, I plan around my probably-sub-par-for-the-motte Will stat by paying for an app that lockdowns, limits and blocks my biggest time wasters on my phone.
I am perfectly aware of the difference, courtesy of ADHD and varying degrees of depression.
I'd say my willpower is as spiky as a porcupine. Herculean levels when it comes to work and professional advancement, if you know what I've had to suffer through, you'd get it. Ridiculously low in other places. I have that iron in me, I've survived things that would make many people quit or die. It just happens to be pig-iron.
The majority of people here would do better than me in the domains where I confess weakness, and those domains are the ones relevant here.
If you have a stash of superstimuli you can't resist staring you in the face, close your eyes, or get them out of the way. Installing an app that specifically gates the usage of the other apps of concern. Block websites. Locking your phone away is like locking yourself in the shitter so you don't go for the fridge.
More importantly, people consistently mythologize what they'd do without the all consuming specter of "phones." Yeah, I'm sure you're going to learn Latin, take up gardening and run that half marathon. Or call their mom, oh wait, no phone. Grand projects of self-improvement aside, even the marginal effect is likely minimal. I'd say it's both easier and less ridiculous to simply figure out better ways to spend the time on the phone doing better things on the phone.
I'm not sure why you're being so obtuse about this point. The phone is specifically designed to make it very difficult for you to avoid hyper stimuli. Yes you can change the settings to turn off notifications, make the phone greyscale, restriction app usage, etc. When I have done those things they make me use my phone less, because, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's much more pleasant to read on a physical book or e-reader than on your phone, it's much more pleasant to write essays on a laptop or physical notebook, and its much more pleasant to talk to people in real life (or call them without the screen on). When you remove the super stimuli, the phone is not that useful, so I don't see a very big difference between what you recommend and locking it up.
Not obtuse, just unconvinced. I'll try to be clearer about my stance:
I concede the design point entirely. The devices are adversarial. There's a building full of people in Menlo Park whose comp package depends on my thumb continuing to move, and I don't flatter myself that I'm immune. It is just, in my experience, a milder disease than most people think. A lot of innate dysfunction is blamed on the phones. That's why my recommendation was blockers rather than raw willpower. I'm not telling anyone to git gud in the face of a slot machine. I just wish to point out that it's not just a slot machine. It's like avoiding a city just because it has a few casinos in it.
Where I get off the bus is here:
My phone with Instagram, Twitter and Reddit stripped out is still:
I haven't used my laptop in six months, which is a shame, because I paid like £1200 for it. I only game on my PC because... the reasons are obvious.
It's the only way I speak to my parents from several thousand kilometres away. Calling that "not that useful" is a claim about your usage patterns being generalised into a claim about the hardware. Yours might genuinely be a Meta machine with a phone app bolted on, in which case locking it in a box costs you nothing and I withdraw my objection in your particular case. Mine isn't. And it is clear to me that's true for most people reading this.
I do almost all my reading on my phone. I genuinely can't remember the last time I bought a dead tree book. I acknowledge this puts me in a minority.
But the armchair with book in hand isn't what the phone is competing with. It's competing with eleven minutes in a queue at Tesco, a bus ride, the dead twenty minutes between clinics, and 3am when I'm awake on a night shift. I do not carry a Penguin Classic into the toilet. The realistic counterfactual for most of my reading time is not a better reading experience, it's worse, or none.
Which brings me to the actual disagreement, which is about the counterfactual rather than about superstimuli. Your model says the phone is a plug in the drain and pulling it lets the good stuff flow back. That is a well established vibe consensus but the evidence for that is thinner than people assume.
When English schools banned phones for the school day, the students didn't use their phones less overall or score better on wellbeing, sleep or attainment; they just shifted the usage till they got outside.
(That makes the whole "phones in school are bad for you" rather moot)
Meanwhile an RCT explicitly designed to teach goal-directed use rather than reduction performed about as well as a standard digital detox condition on problematic use). That is what I'm advocating.
Removing access and improving allocation seem to land in roughly the same place, which is what you'd expect if the binding constraint is what the person wants to do with their attention rather than where their attention is physically able to go.
A blocker is a scalpel: I lose the slop and keep the library. I don't need this, but I could do it.
A lock box is a tourniquet: it works, at the cost of the limb.
My on-call registrar cannot ring a box. I appreciate that FtttG's box has a timer and that this is a solved problem for most evenings, and honestly if it's working for him he should keep doing it. I am just concerned about he hasn't tried something... less extra.
My gripe is with the version of this that treats total removal as the obviously superior intervention because the intermediate one requires trusting yourself a bit.
And I stand by the mythologising point. The man who locks his phone away for an hour and reads a novel is real and I salute him, he must be, we've got plenty of people on the planet. He is also, in my experience, wildly outnumbered by the man who locks his phone away and then watches telly, or reorganises a drawer, or lies on the sofa contemplating the middle distance in a way he will later describe to himself as restorative. If it turns out that what you actually wanted was a book, you could also have just opened the book.
Replying because you're missing the obvious truth that different strategies work for different people and you do not always know why, especially by reading an internet post. First Toil then the Grave's plan may work for him splendidly, and not because he has some defect of character.
I concede all the usefulness of smartphones (I am typing this by the way on a computer). I still balk at your seemingly inalterable attachment to them. The other day on a walk I witnessed nearly every third person driving by looking at his or her phone. Who knows why. A map, a menu, an emergency text from a pregnant wife, a thesis on Heidegger. Or maybe just some dumbass inflammatory reel or so-called influencer. I do know that were Japanese suburban traffic only slightly faster on average that there would be a lot more swerving and crashing than there is now. And this with a current law enacting large fines and potential voiding of licenses for driving while staring at a phone.
People lose situational awareness when gazing at phones. They forget where they are, they forget what used to be basic manners. And this is in Japan where actually speaking on a phone in an enclosed space (such as a bus or train) is still tantamount to open-mouthed sneezing in an elevator. I still see it, and not always from foreigners. I had a girlfriend in grad school who used to read fucking books while driving until she was warned repeatedly that this was a reckless, selfish thing to do. This of course does not mean that reading books is innately harmful. Nobody is saying books are the devil. Still, reading has never been the best way to learn. As for phones, we've all seen the pithy quote.
You suggest @FtttG has claimed:
And maybe that was his intention (I did not get that.) And I understand perhaps yours is just an instinctive desire to defend technology or modernism or whatever.
But phones are not always, or even most of the time, such a wonderful thing, despite what is perhaps their potential to be such. Any more than many things that should be good, that are good in theory, that seem foolproof in their benefit to humanity, end up fucking people up. But then you know all this and you know some version of all the stories I might tell to make this point. I predict that you will remain intransigent. I would consider this a blind spot of yours, a shortcoming worth reflecting on. You will not agree. Call me Kreskin. You do you, as they say.
I'm not stupid. I couldn't miss that if I tried.
I have said, rather clearly:
Really? Are we going to psychoanalyzing arguments here? I can't stop you, even if that is an incorrect assessment. I've read the relevant literature, and shared it. It's not a content-free claim.
It would be trivial for me to turn this around and say that to you, and many others raising objections, phones are a mythical boogeyman holding them back from self-actualization. As I pointed out to @Iconochasm, their utility is ridiculously high even with the dopamine-pumps removed. Did I want to say this? Not really. I wouldn't, if you hadn't. I think it's true anyway.
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