Your phone is shaping your attention, your desires, and ultimately your life—and not for the better. Let me be clear: your phone is also incredibly beneficial, but virtually everyone has developed unhealthy habits around them. One of the most impactful things any of us could do to improve the quality of our lives is to remove these negative uses as much as possible.
In the following several points, I am primarily thinking about compulsive phone use that seeks constant stimulation and distraction. You know what I am talking about—compulsively doing any of the following: checking email, refreshing stats, gaming, short-form video watching, social media scrolling, etc. I am thinking of the kind of use that makes us check our phones at every spare moment and feel a pull towards them even when we are engaged in more meaningful activities.
1. Your phone is making silence unbearable.
Most of us are unable to endure 5 minutes of alone time without checking our phones. This compulsive behavior is not only hurting us, but it is also proof that we have already been harmed. The reason you live your life this way, and that downtime without your phone feels unbearable, is because you have already been conditioned to seek constant stimulation. The more you do it, the more you are being conditioned, and the more unbearable the silence will become.
2. Your phone is stealing your peace.
Giving in to the constant desire for stimulation steals your peace. It makes you feel more harried, rushed, and restless. It is a form of low-key stress that persists throughout your entire day. It leaves you feeling like you have been busy all day, with little or nothing to show for it. This is not a mere opinion; compulsive use has been scientifically linked to anxiety and depression.
3. Your phone is making you absent from your own life.
Your phone can make you feel connected to everyone while being present with no one. Our culture is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. This is because we have chosen to interact with carefully curated digital personas over the people right in front of us. Even if we know the person, substituting online comments and likes for meaningful interpersonal interaction may feel like we are cultivating relationships, but it is a shallow substitute for genuine presence.
4. Your phone is destroying your ability to focus.
Stimulation is not the same as fulfillment. Seeking stimulation is easy; pursuing fulfillment requires time and disciplined attention. If you stopped scrolling and watching short-form video for just two days, you would begin to notice an increased ability to focus and find yourself more productive on aspects of life and work that lead to greater fulfillment. That is because stimulating online activity not only fills your time but also makes it extremely difficult to return to focused work once you are done.
We often think, “I will take a quick break and watch some videos, then I will get back to it.” The problem is that “short break” ramps up your desire for stimulation, making it much more difficult to get back to work. This is why it is crucial never to start your day by scrolling and watching those kinds of videos, as they will hijack your ability to focus for the rest of the day. Your morning routine sets the day’s tone; choose it wisely.
5. Algorithms are shaping your desires.
You have both shallow cravings and deeper longings. Shallow cravings need immediate fulfillment. Outrage, curiosity, envy, lust, tribalism, vanity, distraction, and novelty are easy to trigger and highly effective at keeping you scrolling.
Your deeper longings—your desire to grow in character, achieve long-term goals, etc.—require that you put off your shallow cravings to achieve them. It requires delayed gratification. Pursuing your more noble longings requires virtues like patience and moderation. Algorithms seek to gratify you immediately, so those virtues needed to pursue your deeper longings will be contrary to the algorithms. The more you spend time in algorithm-driven environments, the more they shape your inner life by strengthening your base desires and diminishing your deeper longings.
6. Your phone is creating the emptiness it promises to cure.
Many forms of compulsive phone use function like addiction because they create the very emptiness they promise to relieve. As already mentioned, overuse of social media and other similar apps has been proven to leave people anxious, depressed, lonely, and empty. That emptiness is what drives us to seek more stimulation. Like a narcissistic friend, it causes the problem, then promises to be the solution, only to leave you feeling more dependent and empty. If you want to flourish, you must end this exploitive relationship.
7. Your phone is wasting your life.
You are mortal, and you will soon be facing an illness or hardship that will bring greater clarity to the time of your death. As that time becomes clearer and you look back on how you spent your days, the one thing you will never say is, “I wish I had spent more time compulsively checking my phone and getting lost in the digital world instead of interacting with the people right in front of me. I wish I had spent more time on social media and feeding my lower desires at the expense of my deeper longings.” To die well, you need to live well. Our time is limited, so it is time to get busy living.
The Two-Day Test
I am not saying you need to get rid of your phone, but you likely need to change how you use it—or should I say, how it is using you. My challenge to you is to avoid these seven harms completely for just two days. This short test will not be easy, but let that difficulty serve as proof of how much you have been conditioned. Then use that proof to resolve yourself further to remove these negative influences from your life permanently.
-D. Eaton
The Fight of Faith 