Red telephone box. London, February 2023

I remember when I bought my first iPhone. It was in Beijing in late 2012. I spent hours reading up and watching videos about the older iPhone 4s and the newly released iPhone 5. My coworker eventually groaned, "just get the newer one, it will last longer." I was so naive throughout that first smartphone purchase. Thing is, that first iPhone altered my behavior.

Before Beijing, I lived in Cape Town, my roommate and I sharing a small house with no internet, no TV, and far outside the city center. Those 4 months were probably the most productive of my adult life post school: I read dozens of books, established my life philosophy and values over many weeks (and got my first tattoo to commemorate it upon leaving the country), and wrote pages and pages of material. With no overt distractions, I deeply introspected and got shit done. Upon moving to Beijing, when I still had my brick Nokia, I barely used my cellphone and rarely had it on my person. I was fully immersed in the world around me whenever out in public, with nothing to distract me during "dull moments." I used to carry around a little notebook, jotting down thoughts or observations, often while riding the subway. I would sketch things as well, filling up notebook after notebook. My thoughts were calm and collected, and I felt strong intention in my life. Then the iPhone arrived (I accepted my coworker's advice and got the iPhone 5. Thanks Amybabe). I remember becoming addicted to a game on it, and playing that game nightly for months. I began to read books less, and surf the web more. Video calling with friends or family back home changed; originally it was a big deal to set up a time and date and confirm which program (usually Skype) we would connect with, which necessitated using the computer. Even the preliminary versions of Facetime and iMessage made it ubiquitous for such communication. My phone replaced my notebook while riding the subway lines of Bejing. Maybe not in an obvious way, but my life, my thinking, was different.

Fast forward ten years later, and I think about the deeply engrained habits revolving around my phone. I check it immediately upon waking and just before bed. I whip it out the moment I'm bored. It's literally within arm's reach 99% of the time, awake or not. I've tried to combat such listless attachment to it over the years. I've named it "This is a Tool" in an attempt to remind me of its true purpose. I've experimented with having it in the other room, or not using it until a certain time. I've only upgraded twice in ten years. But the powers that be--trillion-dollar tech behemoths employing teams of the world's best engineers to capture your attention--have proved too strong. I always revert back to an undesirable behavior, usually in moments of weakness when I'm tired or hungover.

My wife teaches kindergarten, and we frequently discuss the apparent differences the children display now. Over the past few years, it's evident they struggle with emotional regulation, doing things they don't want to do, handling consequences, etc. Of course, they're five and six years old. They're learning all of those things. Hell, I'm still learning them at 35. But the behavioral patterns now are clearly different than a few years ago. The effects of the pandemic, namely locking children up for 2 years, almost certainly figures to be the main culprit, and is a variable we can't fully understand because it was so unique. However, any child born within the past decade has grown up using mobile devices since birth (true even at my wife's low-income school). I've witnessed infants, literal infants, swipe and pinch on iPad screens. Our children are raised in an electronic world, constantly provided dopamine through the prevalent use of our increasingly captivating devices. Their brains are literally forming differently.

And I wonder how common this is across the entire planet. Or rather, how common it is for people to not be addicted to their phone. Smartphones have been accessible to 68% of the world's population for 7 years now. Our collective psychology is not only hijacked by these machines, but our neurochemistry is changing. I don't know how to approach this conundrum, but what if solving this one problem lead to many other answers? What if it really is as simple as us unplugging? Think about it: there would be less Twitter warfare, because people would use social media less because they'd be on their phones less. Perhaps we could regain our humanity by having more social interactions face to face, without distraction, because we would not be communicating solely by phone. Maybe we would collectively become more aware, more compassionate, simply by determining how to leverage the power of our technology while limiting its detrimental effects. Could the predicament of raising our global consciousness, counterintuitively, be achieved by using this technology less?