time spent offline

Isn’t it ironic that there are apps designed to help minimize our digital addiction?

Fight fire with fire, I guess.

The digital world can be all-consuming and there is a good reason for that: attention = profit. The more Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are able to harvest our attention, the more money they make from digital advertisers vying for our attention to consume their products, services, and information. That constant itch to glance at your phone incessantly? It’s a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to capture your attention. The better big tech learns about the inner workings and vulnerabilities of our psychology, the easier it can keep us glued to our devices.

The word radical describes a person, an action or a thing that is especially impressive, inspiring, extraordinary, revolutionary, visionary, exciting, remarkable, exceptional, amazing, marvellous, sensational, incredible, unbelievable, phenomenal, spectacular… You get the point. Naturally, most of my approaches to practicing digital well-being have been extreme; like quitting social media altogether or trying to flush my phone down the toilet. Spoiler alert: iPhone 4s doesn’t flush.

If you are anything like the average smartphone user, you spend around 4 hours each day on your phone. That is roughly 50 days a year. If you’re also anything like the average smartphone user, a good chunk of the time you spend on your phone is spent on social networking sites: 2.4 hours to be exact. Even Apple knows that that is a little bit too much time for its users to spend on their devices. So much so that, Apple released the Screen Time app back in 2018 as part of its “digital health” initiative to address growing concerns around increasing device usage, smartphone addiction and social media’s impact on our mental well-being. One feature of the Screen Time app is to track the hours a user spends on their phone on a daily and weekly basis and generate a report. Back then, my daily phone use average was around 5 hours a day, or 35 hours a week. I couldn’t figure out how, especially after quitting social media and trying every trick out there to spend less time online, I was still spending close to forty hours a week on my phone. That’s a full-time job.

If I told you your attention is worth billions of dollars, would you believe me? In 2019, Instagram reportedly generated $20 billion in revenue, “an extraordinary success” for a photo-sharing app. That same year, Facebook made $70.9 billion. What exactly is apps like Instagram and Facebook selling to generate such a staggering amount of profit? Attention. To generate profit, the likes of Facebook would do anything to keep us constantly paying attention to their apps and feeds, including offering their services for free. We pay the price in our collectively declining mental, physical, and social well-being. Attention harvesting and selling is a very profitable business model. The slot-machines in our pockets ping, ding, and provide limitless content to command our attention and we give our attention away freely.

A couple years back, a few friends and I went to Nuit Blanche to see art installations scattered throughout downtown Toronto and in the process we got a reality check about life. As we were strolling through downtown, a friend says, “I never look up” and at that statement, we all look up; observing buildings and structures we have never noticed before that moment. Mind you, we have all been to that part of downtown plenty of times. We have walked past that same street time and time again. Yet, it wasn’t until the night of Nuit Blanche, at approximately 5am, slightly tipsy and a bit delirious from lack of sleep, that we realized we don’t look up enough. Since we were looking for art that night, we actually paid attention to our surroundings: We looked up and around. Art was everywhere.

There are plenty of explanations for why we don’t look up enough, if ever. In part, we can blame the proliferation of our smartphone devices. We can also put the blame on our ever-so-busy culture that has us hurrying from place to place, with no time or energy to take in our surrounds. Regardless of the causes, it is amazing what we can notice when we pay attention to our surroundings; when we look up and around. The mundane becomes the most entrancing. Beauty is everywhere. So, look up: At trees, buildings, the sky, the clouds, bird mobs, a plastic bag floating aimlessly in the air. It is far more interesting than any memes or recycled Tik Tok videos on your social media feed. I promise. Look up and look around to find out.

Understanding digital tools don’t cause our digital addiction is one thing. The attention economy is a whole other beast. There is not enough willpower in the world to avoid the constant instant gratification and distractions a smartphone provides. We need a more aggressive solution to take back our precious time and attention. One such solution is to simply opt out. If you have it in you, switch to an actual dumb phone and be done with it. No, you don’t need a smartphone. People who actually, really need a smartphone in all its glory don’t read blog posts about turning their smartphone into a dumb phone. That’s just a hunch. For the rest of us who don’t want to give up our smartphone but still want to spend less time on it, there is a way to turn it into a tool rather than an attention guzzling machine.

Addiction is escapism.

It is an attempt to escape the unappealing realities of life; pain, boredom, loss, emotional turmoil, suffering. The widely accepted definition of addiction describes addiction as the excessive use of drugs or alcohol to escape, relax, or as a reward to enjoy life; with the belief that you can’t cope without them. Addiction has two basic qualities: you do more of the thing than you would like to, and you continue to do it despite its negative consequences. At least three of the following criteria must be met to be diagnosed for addiction: tolerance, withdrawal, limited control, negative consequences, neglecting or postponing activities, significant time or energy spent, and the desire to cut down. The digital world is no exception. Those of us addicted to our devices or social media can check at least three of the above seven criteria in regards to our relationship with technology. Restlessness when smartphone is out of reach? Withdrawal. Scrolling through Instagram instead of working on that report due tomorrow? Neglecting or postponing activities. Spending hours on social media every day? Significant time or energy spent.