On a recent episode of Galaxy Brain, The Atlantic magazine’s tech culture podcast, the writer Kaitlyn Tiffany used an expression I’d never encountered before, and which immediately struck me as indispensable: “doing phone”. She was talking about the hours of her life that were lost to staring at her phone’s screen, and the slightly dumbfounded realisation that she had spent a significant stretch of time doing nothing but scrolling. “You can kind of sit down and be like, I’m gonna have a cup of coffee and stand up in 10 minutes and go about my day, and then 45 minutes later be like, oh, I was just doing phone. I don’t really know what occurred during that time.”
Doing phone. Something about the outright stupidity of the phrase, its syntactical half-absurdity, perfectly encapsulated the mindlessness of the phenomenon she was invoking. And it seemed to capture, too, my own frequent experiences of emerging from a fugue state of lost time – 20 minutes here, an hour there – into a feeling of bewilderment and mild agitation. What the hell had I been doing with my time? I had, of course, been doing phone.
It’s something I’d been thinking about a lot over the past while, without having quite so resplendently stupid a phrase with which to frame it. I’ve always had a somewhat anxious and neurotic relationship to time. This manifested, in my later childhood and in my early teens, as a near-constant awareness of adult life looming just over the horizon, of the days of my childhood innocence being numbered. (The paradox I wasn’t conscious of at the time, of course, was that this sort of neurotic time-consciousness was hardly innocent at all, that to be aware of one’s childhood innocence is to have already lost it.) In adulthood, it’s characterised by an ever-present sense of a dwindling store of hours in the day, a likewise dwindling store of days in the month, the year. This is, of course, an anxiety about death; and anxiety about death is always, at least in part, an anxiety about life, and what you’re doing with it.
I’m thinking, here, of a line from the American poet and essayist Annie Dillard’s book The Writing Life: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” What we are doing – almost all of us, too much of the time – is phone. And doing phone is no way to spend a life.
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I’ve been trying recently to become more “intentional” in my relationship with technology, to cut down on the number of smartphone fugue states in a given day. (Excuse the scare-quotes around intentional here, but part of the difficulty of this whole terrain is that it’s so strewn with jargon and cliche as to be nearly impassible; even discussing it in the first place seems almost as much a symptom of the problem as an attempted diagnosis. It’s hard to shake the suspicion that writing and talking about doing phone is, in some mysterious sense, still doing phone – that there is nothing, as Jacques Derrida might have put it, outside of the phone.)
[ Addictive by design: this is the verdict every parent has been waiting forOpens in new window ]
This effort first mostly involved trying to become more consciously aware of what, in doing phone, I was actually doing. It involved trying to become more alive to the fact that rather than just waiting for the light to turn green at a pedestrian crossing, I was taking a device out of my pocket and scrolling through social media, or checking my email; that I was, rather than actually reading a book in my spare evening hours, mostly picking it up and putting it down between bouts of staring into the small abyss in my hand. I began to notice that the only time I was ever really able to become fully immersed in a book was when I read for an hour or so in bed, where the phone I had left charging downstairs no longer exerted its gravitational pull on my attention.
And so I decided to address the problem of my relationship to consumer electronics in the only way I know how: by purchasing more consumer electronics. I bought a thing called Brick, a chunk of plastic containing an NFC (near field communication) chip, that disables all the distracting apps and functions on your smartphone. When you touch your phone to it, it “bricks” the device until such time as you touch it off it again to “unbrick” it. The idea is that this creates a physical friction, in a way that simply deleting attention-hogging apps, or using web-blocking productivity software doesn’t.
So far, I’ve found it incredibly effective. Something about the act of walking into the kitchen, where the Brick is stuck to my fridge with a magnet, and bricking my phone is far more effective than just putting it on “Do Not Disturb” setting. I’ve taken to bricking my phone when I leave the house, so that I’m still contactable by call and text, but not constantly taking the thing out to monitor the world’s many terrible situations, which will continue to worsen whether I monitor them or not.
I also bought, perhaps a little extravagantly, a dedicated digital audio player: essentially a contemporary version of the MP3 players that reigned supreme in the blessed interregnum between the advent of digital file-sharing and the mass adoption of the smartphone and streaming services. It’s solved a problem I had been repeatedly encountering in my attempts to spend less time doing phone: if I wanted to listen to music or a podcast while out walking the dog or whatever, I had to take my phone with me, which invariably led me right back into doing phone.
Reverting to using what is essentially an MP3 player in the year of our Lord 2026 is no doubt on some level a symptom of an acute mid-life nostalgia. The fact that it has a built-in screensaver that makes it look like an iPod is, I will admit, certainly evidence for the prosecution. But nostalgia for the era of MP3 players is not just nostalgia for a bygone youth; it’s also nostalgia for a time when you could listen to music without also doing a dozen other things too; for a time when you could just do what you were doing, without also doing phone. And as much as this might be nostalgia for a lost and lamented digital past, I find myself thinking, in my more optimistic moments, that it might also be the future.
