my phone hates me more than i hate it
on reclaiming attention, the sinister business of it, and what it's doing to our desire
1. can you try to not be an addict?
one of the best reads on phone addiction. it’s well known now. the urge to check our phones first thing in the morning, the constant checking of (and being distracted by) notifications, the endless doomscrolling, it’s killing us all. do we need to? have we lost the battle? is it still worth trying some thing?
oof, what an opening:
The first moment of wakefulness is a fragile, almost holy state. It is the briefest instant in which you exist wholly outside the digital architecture of modern life, unburdened by messages, updates, or the slow, crawling terror of reality. And yet, before your consciousness fully assembles, the hand twitches. It knows where the phone is. It reaches, blindly, before the mind can intervene.
Do not let it.
and then what a lyrically crafted call out on “revenge procrastination”1 aka i will numb my mind (and eyes) until i feel nothing and hope to pass out into poor-quality sleep…
The night arrives, and with it comes the peculiar modern tragedy: a day too brief for joy now extends itself by consuming the hours meant for rest.
This is when your phone reveals its true nature—not merely a tool but a small, glowing portal offering the illusion of reclaimed time. Stay with me, it suggests without words. The day has cheated you of leisure, so take it now, in these quiet hours that should belong to sleep.
We call this "decompression," this stolen time. A modest rebellion against days that offer no respite. Yet in this rebellion, we make ourselves accomplices in our own exhaustion. We trade tomorrow's clarity for tonight's brief freedom, scrolling through images and words that neither nourish nor truly satisfy, but merely postpone the inevitable.
“The phone is not the enemy. The enemy is fear—fear of stillness, fear of silence, fear of being alone with one's own thoughts.”
2. your screen time does’t need to be their topline
a lot has been written about how eyeballs and your attention drive ad-revenue and thereby the topline of multinational corporations. it was therefore so refreshing to read this piece by india’s darling unicorn company which runs an online brokerage platform.
A food delivery app that sends half a dozen notifications a day at odd hours pushing users to buy food, or a ride hailing app that randomly asks “want to go somewhere today?” (wut). These are probably backed by extensive data mining and A/B testing and may be driving “conversions”. The goal here is maximisation of certain numbers, not utility for the end user.
raises the important question around ethics, about whether ‘true’ product-market-fit even needs marketing, and ofcourse, how bootstrapped companies can choose to do this with greater ease than the VC-backed obsession over engagement metrics.
READ HERE: User Disengagement, by Kailash Nath, CTO at ZerodhaThinking of it, one realises that it is a matter of ethics more than software. If the decision makers have the conscience and liberty to ask themselves the simple question, “would I want this for myself as a user?", a lot of user-hostility and garish, shambolic techno-product-business experiments that do not provide utility to users, would disappear.
3. it’s not just personal, phones as symbols for love & social standing
i’ve been following Dharmesh Ba’s blog for a while, ever since he started his series2 chronicling a day in the lives of india’s gig workers. this one’s a good piece on how the conversation on phone usage and addiction must factor what phones (and especially whatsapp) mean for indians and our sense of recognition, pride, status… and also romantic attention & communication.
I didn't find this particularly strange until one day I realized that her profile picture disappears every time we have an argument. It took me a few months to decipher this pattern, but I soon realized that if her profile picture vanishes, it means I've really upset her. It reflects her state of mind.
i absolutely love when someone comments a fascinating insight from their lived experience. this one’s cool around whatsapp also being a virtue-signalling symbol:
4. let me be just a little surprised pleeeasee
there is no mystery anymore in the world. nothing has a surprise element to it. even a dinner outside now comes with a default expectation of pre-research and a meticulous selection basis ambience & menu & reviews. what if i just go to a restaurant and…find out what the food tastes like? gasp.
Today, everyone and everything is always available, and there’s nothing less sexy than that. There’s no chase. Our phones don’t allow us time to dwell, and they don’t allow us time to yearn.
nothing is really flirtatious, titillating - because it’s all too available. tech is making us lazy. and entitled. solid piece on what tech means for eros:
5. complex problems need creative solutions
save us all at least 10% of screen time.
you’re probably reading this on a smartphone which is ironical, but hey one step at a time, eh?
until next time & new reads!
🌻
~ rufus
“revenge bedtime procrastination” refers to the decision to delay sleep in response to stress or a lack of free time earlier in the day
the brief 3-part series is linked here