Less is much more.
Rob Pike
Smartphones are very useful, but they
are addictive , located in the midst of attempts by residents of Silicon Valley to capture an even greater percentage of our mind. This is an attempt to control our behavior, they seize us, and it is impossible to leave it like this.
Let's just for the sake of interest, use a
post with a list of signs that you have developed a drug addiction, and slightly redo the key behaviors so that they describe addiction to smartphones:
- You continue to use the phone even after it is no longer needed to solve your problem.
- You spend more and more time with the phone to achieve the same effect.
- You feel strange if you don’t have a telephone.
- You can’t stop using the phone even if you don’t want to use it.
- It's hard for you to assign yourself restrictions. You can say that you’ll sit with your phone “there’s so much,” but then you’ll break loose and spend twice as much with it. Or you use it more often than you wanted.
- You start having problems in order to perform everyday tasks without a phone.
- You combine the phone with driving a car or other dangerous actions (for example, driving a tractor).
- You borrow money to pay for your phone.
- You hide from others the fact that you use the phone or the result of its influence on you.
A smart (smart) phone provides something unique to the human mind. He opens a constantly working, constantly connected portal to a huge range of different award-winning machines. Choose your poison yourself: email, stock quotes, social networks, news feeds, link aggregators; the list goes on. But, despite all the benefits and potential of the phone, with it comes a whole bunch of unpleasant modifications of repetitive behavior.
We sit down on a strange mix of pocket casinos with variable rewards and capitalism snooping. The price of a game in a casino is your attention, and in return your brain seems to be provided with an endless stream of
dopamine . And this
capture of our centers of pleasure in a very strange way affects the brain.
If you weren’t happy to share the details of your Facebook life, you wouldn’t. Therefore, Facebook is actively working to make you like it. And if you like it, and you come back for an addition, you begin to behave as you would otherwise not. You come back for likes, you think up updates, even when you are not sitting on Facebook, and you are moving through life, thinking of ways to link it to Facebook. And in exchange for a dose of dopamine, Facebook packs your behavior related to the data of your profile, both indicated by you and those that you did not provide, and sells them to the one who pays the most (the
audience who also hopes to change your behavior even more ).
But this article is not about Facebook, right? This is an article about smartphones. I'm just digging up Facebook to achieve the effect. Facebook may provide a dose, but a smartphone is the way to deliver it. It has portability, push updates, proximity sensors, it behaves completely differently from all other devices in our life. Of course, we can decide to stop using it. But does this mean that we need to go back to push-button phones? Is it an option? What about a complete rejection of the phone?
Many people came precisely to such conclusions.
And although the idea of completely abandoning the phone is interesting to me, I wanted to explore another option - stupid smartphone. Can we leave the beautiful aspects of the smartphone, minimizing those that are addictive? What if we could make our phones so boring that we would pay attention to them only when we need it? What if we could get rid of most, or all, of the functions that cause the dopamine rush, and leave the phone in a useful, but boring state? It is with this that I have experimented over the past month, and I want to describe it here.
Step One - Remove All Fun
- No games
- no applications for streaming video (youtube, netflix, hulu ...),
- no applications for social networks (facebook, twitter, instagram, snap ...)
- no news aggregators.
If the application you need to "kill time", delete it. The ones I listed are obvious and probably the most painful for most of us. The most successful of these applications embed addiction in their services (mention the game "
Fortnite " in the presence of a fourteen-year-old, and see what happens). If you need to use any of these applications, use them on your computer. I have been without social networks for some time, and for me the drug was YouTube. I am subscribed to three dozen channels, and spent more time on it than I would like to admit, “tracking” all this on a smartphone. Instead, I spend a special period of time for “youtube channels” every day, and finish it.
Step two - move applications with variable rewards to a separate folder
On my home screen are:
- Settings.
- Password Manager.
- Convert units.
- Music.
- Audiobooks.
- Interval training timer.
- Translator.
- Folder "everything else."
Bored, yes? The point is to leave the applications that do not cause a tide of dopamine on the home screen, and move all other applications to the folder, to go into which you need to spend a little more effort. There are all chats, calendar, email, etc. Move them “one folder deeper”.
Step Three - Enable Do Not Disturb
I have a “do not disturb” mode on my phone from 9 pm to 6 am. And also automatically turns on while driving.
Step four - disable unnecessary notifications
Disable:
- Notifications on the lock screen (this is useful for privacy).
- Vibration and sound notifications.
- Notifications for all applications that do not really need it.
You need to stop this madness with notifications. Go through the notification settings for each application on your phone and set it to the lowest possible level. Personally, I turned off email notifications, even the icons on the icon. I also moved mail to the folder described in the second step, so if I need to check or send an email from the phone, I can do it, but this is inconvenient and does not give out any information when I turn on the phone.
I work in the technology field, and I understand that some people cannot stay in touch. In this case, I would leave these tools in the “required notifications” mode. Once upon a time I had to keep in touch with work, and I think that I was very lucky that now I don’t need it.
Conclusion
And now you have a more stupid, less interesting phone. I am still actively working on this project, and described to you the state in which it is today. In principle, it was quite interesting to watch how I moved from the state in which I thoughtlessly unlocked the phone and stuck in it for quite a long time, to the state in which I sometimes completely forgot about it for long periods of time.
This setting will allow you to be less distracted by chats and mail, but that’s the point. Your phone should not dictate to you what to focus on, and the behavior “always in touch”, which it cultivates, is harmful to health and badly affects our lives.
Recently, about such things as non-participation and stupid phones, I say this: I am trying to fasten the volume of stimulants and centers of rewards. This is part of the hypothesis that attempts to seek pleasure psychologically block the ability to have fun in your brain. And this view is supported by both modern science and ancient wisdom.