The Smartphone And Your Mind
Seizing control instead of being controlled
Hello there,
Here’s a quote that I love and wish more people thought about:
“The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master ”
Watching more and more people (and their minds) getting hijacked by the magnetic pull of smartphones, I started thinking about a curious idea.
It’s about the parallels between our relationships with our minds and our smartphones (“phones” from hereon because I don’t want to sound like that uncle who keeps using ancient prefixes, like electronic mail and online marketing)
Analyzing how we interact with our phones reveals some interesting parallels with how we interact with and manage our own minds.
The mind is indeed an excellent servant- if you are able to develop mastery over it, you can choose to deploy it for the most beautiful causes- coming up with creative ideas, business plans, and changing the world with your intellect. Similarly, a smartphone has endless potential if used for the right purposes.
But just as with our minds, it’s much easier to deploy it not for the good things (like learning, communication, commerce, etc) but for things that are a net negative for ourselves- depressive doom-scrolling, addictive gaming, and mindless consumption of content that makes us feel worse.
Isn’t that also a mental tendency we most easily succumb to? Endlessly stressing about some past event, non-stop rumination about some future worry, getting caught in never-ending loops from hell.
But the second, deeper parallel is that both the mind and the phone were designed to produce these outcomes. The mind, a product of billions of years of evolution, has developed to experience all those negative emotions and get caught in those pernicious cycles for adaptive reasons. Similarly, the phone was purposely designed to lure you in (by understanding this fatal weakness of your mind) and keep you trapped in the vortex of applications, content, and commerce so someone can make nosebleed profits.
Therefore, the wise approach in dealing with both these foibles is to have a cautious approach, acknowledging the potential to get caught in those deadly loops and adopt a policy of enslavement.
Yes, the mind and the phone, both are wonderful slaves. Will you be a slave to their whims or turn the tables and enslave them instead? Making this one of your biggest priorities in life can make a world of difference.
You could either become a passive servant who is knocked about by the waves of emotions that your mind randomly generates and witness life without any sense of control. Or you could reverse this process and become a high-agency individual who sets the terms of engagement, never operating at the whims of your sensations, but rather informing your all-powerful mind what to do.
Look at it this way, and it’s abundantly clear that those who are addicted to phones (and sexy-UI interfaces in general) aren’t really slaves to the tech itself. That’s just the proximate cause of their enslavement. The deeper cause is that they’re slaves to their own minds, and cannot manage to get out of this sensation-reaction complex.
The trick, therefore, is to strike at the root cause rather than only focusing on the symptoms. What’s required is a deep, experiential process of rewiring the brain, changing its habit pattern so you can try to attain mastery over the mind. The first step on this journey could be to even commit in writing that you will close your eyes and sit for 10 minutes every day, no matter what. Once you’ve started doing that, you can continue learning meditation- the best way would be to attend a formal course.
But I understand that it may not be possible for everyone to go down this path. Sometimes there’s resistance, sometimes there are genuine obstacles that prevent us from building a meditation practice.
In such cases, there’s another method to begin working at least on the symptoms: to consciously adopt a policy of digital minimalism. Most people are at least aware that they have an issue of overuse but don’t know how to solve it. There are a bunch of good books on this topic, and I’d strongly recommend Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism to address this issue posthaste.
I read it just before COVID hit and I’m glad I came across those ideas at the perfect time. I ended up adopting a quasi-adversarial approach to technology- treating my phone as an enemy that had to be controlled, for it could have devastating consequences if I didn’t engage with it on my own terms. You need not take such an extreme approach- unless you find yourself spending 5+ hours a day watching neuron-obliterating reels.
A few big changes that I executed were:
Measuring screen time on a daily basis and trying to keep it under 1-1.5 hours per day
Moving more of my digital activities to the desktop- think net banking, ordering stuff, reading articles- almost everything. It’s because the phone is designed to suck you in through notifications, sounds, and seductive app icons waiting for you to press them. No such shit with your desktop- its seductive powers are many orders of magnitude lower.
Working hard to ensure that every time my hand went to my pocket unconsciously, I’d reverse the hand movement and NOT remove the phone. Practicing boredom and developing the ability to just sit and do nothing was, in hindsight, such a crucial skill. As Yuval Harari says, if you can’t handle boredom, you’ll never be able to enjoy peace and quiet in life.
Investing a greater amount of time in active creation (as opposed to passive consumption): if one engages in activities like writing, playing badminton, or painting, it not only provides the benefit of entering a flow state, but it also leaves much lesser time for the devilish mind to slyly convince you that you’re bored and need to reach out to the phone for “just 5 minutes of Insta”.
But these are just a few ideas, and if you genuinely want to improve your relationship with technology, go ahead and read that book.
In summary, our phones and minds can be our best tools for growth- but by virtue of their design features, it’s easy for us to succumb to their charms and fall prey to their enslaving pattern.
Therefore, it’s crucial to reverse this process by developing a meditative practice and attaining mastery over the mind, so one can automatically gain a sense of agency as they interact with all kinds of technology. Even if you can’t strike at the root cause, you can certainly attack the specific problem of tech addiction by developing a coherent philosophy of technology usage that aligns with your ultimate goals.
So go ahead and reclaim all the lost time, because nobody wants to look back at their lives from the deathbed and say “Wish I’d spent lesser time on those motherfucking cat reels”.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, I’m sure you’d like these:
Enjoying reading these Sunday-morning ideas? Share them with a curious friend.
Nir Eyal's indistarctable is also a good read...
But bigger point is to put into practice atleast a few ideas..