Notes on a Nervous Planet(24)

I think the American writer Edith Wharton was the wisest person ever on loneliness. She believed the cure for it wasn’t always to have company, but to find a way to be happy with your own company. Not to be antisocial, but not to be scared of your own unaccompanied presence.

She thought the cure to misery was to ‘decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone’.





10

PHONE FEARS





A therapy session in the year 2049

ROBOT THERAPIST: So, what is the problem?

MY SON: Well, I think it goes back to my parents.

ROBOT THERAPIST: Really?

MY SON: My dad, specifically.

ROBOT THERAPIST: What was the matter with him?

MY SON: He used to be on his phone all the time. I used to feel like he cared about his phone more than me.

ROBOT THERAPIST: I’m sure that’s not true. A lot of people from that generation didn’t know all the consequences of their phone use. They didn’t know how addictive they were. You have to remember, it was all relatively new back then. And everyone else was doing it, too.

MY SON: Well, it gave me issues. I used to think, Why aren’t I as interesting to him as his Twitter feed? Why wasn’t I as good to look at as the screen of his phone? If only I didn’t feel like I had to distract him to get attention. This was in the days before the 2030 revolution, of course.

ROBOT THERAPIST: Hmmm. Where’s your father now?

MY SON: Oh, he died in 2027. He was run over by a driverless car while trying to find a funny gif.

ROBOT THERAPIST: How sad. And what have you been doing since then?

MY SON: I invested in a robot dad. I looked into all the hologram options but I wanted a dad I could hug. And I have programmed him never to check his notifications. He’s there when I want him.

ROBOT THERAPIST: That is so wonderful to hear.





How to own a smartphone and still be a functioning human being

1.Don’t feel you always have to be there. In the not-soolden days of letters and landlines, contacting someone was slow and unreliable and an effort. In the age of WhatsApp and Messenger it’s free and easy and instant. The flipside of this ease is that we are expected to be there. To pick up the phone. To get back to the text. To answer the email. To update our social media. But we can choose not to feel that obligation. We can sometimes just let them wait. We can risk our social media getting stale. And if our friends are friends they will understand when we need some headspace. And if they aren’t friends, why bother getting back anyway?

2.Turn off notifications. This is essential. This keeps me (just about) sane. All of them. All notifications. You don’t need any of them. Take back control.

3.Have times of the day where you’re not beside your phone. Okay, I’m bad at this one. But I’m getting better. No one needs their phone all the time. We don’t need it by the bed. We don’t need it while we’re eating meals at home. We don’t need it when we go out for a run. Here’s something I do now: I go for a walk without my phone. I know it sounds ridiculous to present that as some big achievement, but for me it was. It’s like exercise. It takes effort.

4.Don’t press the home button to check the screen every two minutes for texts. Practise feeling the urge to check and don’t.

5.Don’t tie your anxiety levels to how much power you have left on your phone.

6.Don’t swear at your phone. Don’t plead with your phone. Don’t bargain with your phone. Don’t throw your phone across the room. It is indifferent to your feelings. If the phone has no signal, or no power, it is not because it hates you. It is because it is an inanimate object. It is, in short, a phone.

7.Don’t put your phone by the bed. I’m not judging, by the way. Most people sleep with their phone by the bed because they’ve replaced alarm clocks. Most nights I have the phone by the bed. My parents have their phones by the bed. Everyone I know has their phones by their beds. Maybe one day our beds will be our phones. But I do seem to sleep better when my phone isn’t by my bed. You know, if it’s in another room, or even just another part of the room. I know it might be unrealistic. But it’s good to have an aspiration. A dream to work towards. To fantasise about the day when we’re strong enough never to need to have the phone by our beds. Like the olden days. The 1800s. The 1900s. 2006.

8.Practise app minimalism. An overload of apps and options adds to the choice but also stress of phone use. We are given an almost infinite array of things we can add to our phones. But more choice leads to more decisions and more stress. You were born without any apps on your phone. Hey! Guess what? You were born without any phone at all. And life was still beautiful.

9.Don’t try to multitask. We have phones that can do everything from map read to tune our guitars, and it’s tempting to imagine that we can do as many things, and all at once. For instance, while writing this one point alone I have had to consciously stop myself from checking my emails, checking my text messages, checking my social media. It took effort. According to neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, we aren’t really made for the kind of multitasking the internet age encourages us to do. ‘Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient,’ he writes, in The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction cycle, rewarding the brain for losing focus. It can also increase stress and lower IQ. ‘Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks,’ concludes Levitin.