Listened to this on my phone 🙃
3 stars
The book is divided into two parts. First, a survey of why the smartphone feels designed to leave you unsatisfied and unhappy. Being 7 years old, this doesn't feel especially new. I'd recommend Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants as a more interesting exploration, both on the supply and demand side (we aren't being forced to consume addictive content, in many cases it's our revealed preference).
The second half is a more practical, month-long effort to add mindfulness and intention to your phone usage. Again I didn't find a lot new here; but it could be useful to have it structured into a formal plan.
The struggle I have with this kind of self-help approach is that it feels like you're cutting against the grain of a systemic problem, and I'm not sure how durable these changes can be. For a while, I had been keeping my phone charged outside my …
The book is divided into two parts. First, a survey of why the smartphone feels designed to leave you unsatisfied and unhappy. Being 7 years old, this doesn't feel especially new. I'd recommend Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants as a more interesting exploration, both on the supply and demand side (we aren't being forced to consume addictive content, in many cases it's our revealed preference).
The second half is a more practical, month-long effort to add mindfulness and intention to your phone usage. Again I didn't find a lot new here; but it could be useful to have it structured into a formal plan.
The struggle I have with this kind of self-help approach is that it feels like you're cutting against the grain of a systemic problem, and I'm not sure how durable these changes can be. For a while, I had been keeping my phone charged outside my bedroom, so I wasn't falling asleep and waking up to it. Then, with the onset of COVID, those habits went out the window.
I appreciate the social aspect of Catherine's advice (having your entire household go through the "digital detox", and putting names to common annoyances ("phubbing" for ignoring a real-life conversation to swipe on your phone). But I'm still pretty pessimistic that barring legal changes to how software is designed, and a cultural reckoning as big as our turn away from smoking, we're going to see this get worse before it gets better.
I've heard folks refer to Mastodon (and other fediverse software) as methadone when compared to Twitter. That feels right. How do we feel about normalizing the digital equivalent of heroin in everyone's pockets at every age?
