Is Your Phone the Reason You Feel Broke?

At the end of the weekend I picked up the phone to check the statistics on how much I'd picked up my phone. The screen-time figures said I'd had 35 minutes on Sunday. On Saturday, I'd had 41 minutes. But on Wednesday, in the grip of unexamined phone dependency, I'd only had 77, and that was the worst day of the workweek—save Monday, when I'd racked... See more

The problem goes deeper than this. Increasingly our tech also opens us up to new vectors of anxiety. Regardless of whether you’re working more or less, your nervous system is now plugged into a neurotic and hypersensitive globe-spanning information system that’s constantly pushing unnecessary things into your consciousness.

When you wake up each morning, do you think: what apps do I want to use?

Or do you wonder instead: what goals do I want to achieve?

For the last decade, our smartphones — the most important computers in our lives — have forced us to think about life in a pretty specific way. “There’s an app for that!” Apple proclaimed, as they laid out the very firs... See more

But now: Tech, phones, and social media create what David calls an “ever-ending now” (99%+ of what people consume is stuff produced in the last 24 hours)

if you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etique

... See more