I agree with this piece directionally, but it also seems hyperbolic in its description of the current state of affairs. I was at a wedding over the weekend where people pretty much kept off their phones all evening. When I hang out with friends we generally keep the phones in our pockets. Yes occasionally someone will look something up on them if it’s directly relevant to the conversation, but then they go away again.
I find the problem of phone addiction impacts me far less in social situations, and more when I’m trying to complete focused work when I’m alone, whether it’s my literal job or a hobby like reading or drawing.
I'm really glad this is true for you! I think it is a rare state of affairs in many circles to attend social events without everyone staring at their phones for large parts of the evening. I'm not sure if this is something survey evidence could illuminate but going to ponder if we can poll some version of this...
Screen time/app usage polls might help. Specifically, how long are you spending looking directly at your phone, and during that time, what are you engaging with?
I suspect time spent looking directly at the phone is less bad than time spent glancing out of the corner of your eye at the phone while claiming to be doing something else.
That sounds like a great wedding! I think where I see phones sneak in, socially, is less during moments of joy and celebration per se and more during moments like the one you describe: There's an information question in a conversation, people look up the answer on their phones, and pretty soon everyone is in Phone World.
And I, too, find that phone addiction is harder to ignore when I’m trying to concentrate on something else. This is why I think we specifically have to resist phones becoming the Default Resting Activity — maybe by not bringing phones in the house. Otherwise it’s just too easy to reach for the phone by habit once you hit a mental roadblock or even become briefly bored.
I concur on all fronts. The piece was a great read (I won the challenge, but there's no way I would've in absence of, well, the explicit challenge), and I have noticed a recent uptick of people in my personal life who seem to have internalized the burgeoning discourse on smartphones and are at least trying to make some adjustments accordingly.
The Sirens' Call of the phone/screen is *much* harder for me to resist when I'm alone.
Good points. I find there are nights where I forget to use my phone (although I'm older than the author and remember social events in the before times pre-phones) and have a great time.
My weakness is the moments of boredom that he mentions. And its not like waiting at the DMV, I mean like the 60 seconds while I'm waiting for my son to get ready for school. For some reason I have to fill that time with information. We need to wean ourselves off that.
I cannot believe I started getting leaky eyed on this, starting right around here:
"What I mean is that we need to stop performing — a little bit, all the time, for the internet — while at the same time begin performing for our family and friends who love us, and even for strangers on the street, whose days are brightened by our presence."
What a beautiful, human piece of writing. I have felt the same things and it's like you've manifested my feelings in writing.
I did get momentarily confused by the “theater kid” metaphor - I was thinking the “theater kid” is the one who engages in some weird and social activity in a place with real humans, rather than the one performing on social media.
To your point about being able to delete the browser: I wonder how much of this is an effect of the amount of control we give producers (eg, Apple) over their product (eg, iPhone & iOS). If apple was not allowed to stop third parties from developing apps that access deep systems-level functionality (as they can now, under my limited understanding), would this issue already be solved?
"Oh, I'm going to finish this post without distraction. I can do *one* post. Surely."
I did not.
I got a notification that my dog was outside the fence. Find the phone (I was reading on a computer). Get fully dressed.Track the dog with her GPS collar. Let her in.
So I failed. But. I really value that distraction. I like my dog, even if she has a bit of wanderlust and my fence is... imperfect.
The idyllic 1990's world seems to have its own imperfections.
If you ever want to see a window into the past, watch The Masters golf tournaments. Phones are not allowed during the playing of the tournament, and people are given prompt exits if they try to circumvent the rule. They keep landlines on the premises in case of emergency. The difference? You see thousands of people engaged with what they're watching & doing, and not just viewing it through the phone lenses as they make little TikTok stories or taking pics to post on their Facebook or Instagram accounts or whatever.
Also I made it through the article without going anywhere! It helps I read on my actual desktop computer where I'm not bombarded with constant distractions popping up
I’ve noticed that about The Masters too. (Well, really, I read someone on social media making the same point you just made.) It gives the whole tournament a different feel, I think. I’d love to see other sports events adopt the same rules.
I suspect golf is one of those sports that requires significant discipline to pay attention to, so they probably needed to institute the no-phone rule early!
I had too much fun with the people on the internet & realized it. I dumped them all & chose my much-more-boring, much-much-smaller, but much-more-tangible circle of real life friends/acquaintances. Greatest choice I've ever made. Shockingly, people in real life get more interesting as you get closer to them, while the people on the internet tend to play all their cards in their hand at once.
Boredom is an astonishingly powerful force, & it's been as delightful as it is agonizing to remember what it's like to be genuinely BORED out of my mind. How sternly it drives me towards other, actual, people. Towards books I should have read years ago. Towards love, towards strangers, towards finishing those projects.
I'm opting out of the attention economy & I strongly recommend you do the same.
I can't wait to find a fully social media free circle. I long to be chatting into the night on a patio with them.
Unbelievable. I only subscribed a couple of days ago and I’m already regretting it. I thought I was signing up for cool policy discussion, not dime-a-dozen blanket social policing of and assumption-making about people you’ve never met. Ugh.
This is a beautiful piece of writing and a really great idea of a platonic local community; however, I might be a horrible person for saying this, but I really don't think this vision of the future is really ever going to happen again.
It's a wonderful goal and picture of an ideal society, but going back to a "dumb-phone" era isnt going to happen. Smartphones are too integral to our lives now; we don't just use them to surf social media or doom scroll through horrible news.
Once again, I think it's a really healthy goal to try and participate in local events, spend time with friends and loved ones, and be attentive and engaged with our family, but it's not possible with how interconnected our lives are to our phones to completely switch them off.
All great ideas, but I think there are root cause problems that still need addressing. The phone is an outward manifestation of things we’ve already internalized over the last 18 years of phone-centric life. Foremost is the idea that each of us has to maintain a personal "brand." Until we kill that concept, our outward lives will keep resembling the ones we curate on the phone. Shared, no-fuss meals will only work if we stop treating dinner as content, whether photos are allowed or not.
I agree that smartphones have costs and can be a drain on our attention (I'm enough of a Luddite that I severely limit my toddler's access to screens), but your complaints about people using them in social situations just don't resonate with me. We're about the same age, since I was also in high school in 2007, and in my experience, among people over 30 there's already a pretty strong taboo against using phones in social situations. This may be different for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Actually, the worst culprit in my personal life is my 72-year-old mother-in-law, and she constantly gets grief from her family about it.
On a different note, this piece is introvert erasure! Not everyone's vision of the good life involves going to social events every weekend. Also: dress codes for men? Really? I'm detecting some notes of social conservatism, which is fine, but again doesn't resonate with this liberal.
I don't know how old the author is, but if you remembered the original iPhone reveal event in '07 then you're probably not as incessantly online as people in their teens and 20s are today. Remembering what the "before times" were like is a kind of experiential recall that allows older folks to check ourselves and attempt to revert back to a less distracted mode of living.
But what are college-aged adults and younger people supposed to do? They very literally grew up with phones and tablets in front of them at all times. And the social norms that developed around them — non-stop communication via messaging apps, online gaming, and filming a performative simulacrum of one's life — are not going to be easily hand-waved away.
I hate the distractions of our phone-addled modernity (and the looming threats of govt. and corporate data collection) as much as anyone, but the list of what we *should* be doing instead of looking at our phones strikes me as kind of elitist.
That said, lmk where the no-bluetooth-speaker hiking trails are and I'll meet you there.
I'm not feeling any of this. It's easy to forget how things used to be before cellphones. It was so easy to disconnect and lose touch with people.
Endless boredom in practice meant sitting around watching hours of TV every day. 20 minutes of commercials for each hour of programming. Hope you enjoy re-runs.
The challenge to read the whole article feels a little weird. Probably a large majority of articles on here are read on phones.
If I'm at a party and someone checks their phone, I try to remember that I don't need to be the center of attention at every moment.
The PSA thing is kinda interesting. I could be wrong, but weren't there a lot of PSAs in the mid-20th century about social etiquette? This has a legit public health reason too, so I think it makes all the sense in the world to start suggesting some social etiquette and boundaries when it comes to phone usage.
First — rudeness is a distinctive kind of normative attitude that expresses a feeling of being wronged by someone. Intuitively, there are going to be many cases of phone use in social settings where bystanders don't feel wronged, but would still like to express their disapproval. Shame is the attitude here, expressed in all the usual ways — a scoff, a snort, a smile, a shake of the head, a stare.
Second — rudeness only sanctions phone use in social settings. If most excessive phone use happens solo, rudeness won't enable us to express the wrongness in that. Shame is the operative attitude to cover those cases, but it's less clear how to enact it. What types of practices would enable us to allocate shame and esteem over phone use in that solo time? The first thing I think of is, ironically, posting a photo of your weekly screen time showing a daily average under 2 hours. Clearly that ain't it, so what could be?
Finally — it's fairly intuitive to understand why excessive social use is either rude, shameful or both. You've done so here — and I think most folks recognize these arguments even if they haven't fully accepted them. But to explain why excessive solo use is shameful, we need different kinds of explanations. There has to be some kind of explanation that grounds the wrongness in its effect on your flourishing. You become less attentive, your conscientiousness decreases, you impair your ability to plan and execute on goals. You wreck your dopamine system. You develop bad taste. You waste your life. You also need to convince people that other people can tell — just based on their behavior — whether they spend too much time on screens solo.
PS — don't let your friends text and drive. If you're in the car with them, ask them to stop. If you see someone staring into their lap while driving... idk. Honk? Grab a clip from your dashcam and post to social media? I'm not sure how to best address this behavior, but it's clearly a present danger.
I agree with this piece directionally, but it also seems hyperbolic in its description of the current state of affairs. I was at a wedding over the weekend where people pretty much kept off their phones all evening. When I hang out with friends we generally keep the phones in our pockets. Yes occasionally someone will look something up on them if it’s directly relevant to the conversation, but then they go away again.
I find the problem of phone addiction impacts me far less in social situations, and more when I’m trying to complete focused work when I’m alone, whether it’s my literal job or a hobby like reading or drawing.
I'm really glad this is true for you! I think it is a rare state of affairs in many circles to attend social events without everyone staring at their phones for large parts of the evening. I'm not sure if this is something survey evidence could illuminate but going to ponder if we can poll some version of this...
Screen time/app usage polls might help. Specifically, how long are you spending looking directly at your phone, and during that time, what are you engaging with?
I suspect time spent looking directly at the phone is less bad than time spent glancing out of the corner of your eye at the phone while claiming to be doing something else.
That sounds like a great wedding! I think where I see phones sneak in, socially, is less during moments of joy and celebration per se and more during moments like the one you describe: There's an information question in a conversation, people look up the answer on their phones, and pretty soon everyone is in Phone World.
And I, too, find that phone addiction is harder to ignore when I’m trying to concentrate on something else. This is why I think we specifically have to resist phones becoming the Default Resting Activity — maybe by not bringing phones in the house. Otherwise it’s just too easy to reach for the phone by habit once you hit a mental roadblock or even become briefly bored.
I concur on all fronts. The piece was a great read (I won the challenge, but there's no way I would've in absence of, well, the explicit challenge), and I have noticed a recent uptick of people in my personal life who seem to have internalized the burgeoning discourse on smartphones and are at least trying to make some adjustments accordingly.
The Sirens' Call of the phone/screen is *much* harder for me to resist when I'm alone.
Good points. I find there are nights where I forget to use my phone (although I'm older than the author and remember social events in the before times pre-phones) and have a great time.
My weakness is the moments of boredom that he mentions. And its not like waiting at the DMV, I mean like the 60 seconds while I'm waiting for my son to get ready for school. For some reason I have to fill that time with information. We need to wean ourselves off that.
I won the challenge! (Although I was reading this on my phone when I should be making breakfast.)
Without our phones, how are we going to read The Argument?
Wait, are other people not printing out every article to enjoy in their wing back chair and smoking jacket?
I cannot believe I started getting leaky eyed on this, starting right around here:
"What I mean is that we need to stop performing — a little bit, all the time, for the internet — while at the same time begin performing for our family and friends who love us, and even for strangers on the street, whose days are brightened by our presence."
What a beautiful, human piece of writing. I have felt the same things and it's like you've manifested my feelings in writing.
Also I won the challenge so there
Congrats on winning the challenge! And this is so kind — thank you. It’s reassuring to hear you've felt the same way too.
I did get momentarily confused by the “theater kid” metaphor - I was thinking the “theater kid” is the one who engages in some weird and social activity in a place with real humans, rather than the one performing on social media.
To your point about being able to delete the browser: I wonder how much of this is an effect of the amount of control we give producers (eg, Apple) over their product (eg, iPhone & iOS). If apple was not allowed to stop third parties from developing apps that access deep systems-level functionality (as they can now, under my limited understanding), would this issue already be solved?
"Oh, I'm going to finish this post without distraction. I can do *one* post. Surely."
I did not.
I got a notification that my dog was outside the fence. Find the phone (I was reading on a computer). Get fully dressed.Track the dog with her GPS collar. Let her in.
So I failed. But. I really value that distraction. I like my dog, even if she has a bit of wanderlust and my fence is... imperfect.
The idyllic 1990's world seems to have its own imperfections.
If you ever want to see a window into the past, watch The Masters golf tournaments. Phones are not allowed during the playing of the tournament, and people are given prompt exits if they try to circumvent the rule. They keep landlines on the premises in case of emergency. The difference? You see thousands of people engaged with what they're watching & doing, and not just viewing it through the phone lenses as they make little TikTok stories or taking pics to post on their Facebook or Instagram accounts or whatever.
Also I made it through the article without going anywhere! It helps I read on my actual desktop computer where I'm not bombarded with constant distractions popping up
I’ve noticed that about The Masters too. (Well, really, I read someone on social media making the same point you just made.) It gives the whole tournament a different feel, I think. I’d love to see other sports events adopt the same rules.
I suspect golf is one of those sports that requires significant discipline to pay attention to, so they probably needed to institute the no-phone rule early!
I had too much fun with the people on the internet & realized it. I dumped them all & chose my much-more-boring, much-much-smaller, but much-more-tangible circle of real life friends/acquaintances. Greatest choice I've ever made. Shockingly, people in real life get more interesting as you get closer to them, while the people on the internet tend to play all their cards in their hand at once.
Boredom is an astonishingly powerful force, & it's been as delightful as it is agonizing to remember what it's like to be genuinely BORED out of my mind. How sternly it drives me towards other, actual, people. Towards books I should have read years ago. Towards love, towards strangers, towards finishing those projects.
I'm opting out of the attention economy & I strongly recommend you do the same.
I can't wait to find a fully social media free circle. I long to be chatting into the night on a patio with them.
Unbelievable. I only subscribed a couple of days ago and I’m already regretting it. I thought I was signing up for cool policy discussion, not dime-a-dozen blanket social policing of and assumption-making about people you’ve never met. Ugh.
This is a beautiful piece of writing and a really great idea of a platonic local community; however, I might be a horrible person for saying this, but I really don't think this vision of the future is really ever going to happen again.
It's a wonderful goal and picture of an ideal society, but going back to a "dumb-phone" era isnt going to happen. Smartphones are too integral to our lives now; we don't just use them to surf social media or doom scroll through horrible news.
Once again, I think it's a really healthy goal to try and participate in local events, spend time with friends and loved ones, and be attentive and engaged with our family, but it's not possible with how interconnected our lives are to our phones to completely switch them off.
All great ideas, but I think there are root cause problems that still need addressing. The phone is an outward manifestation of things we’ve already internalized over the last 18 years of phone-centric life. Foremost is the idea that each of us has to maintain a personal "brand." Until we kill that concept, our outward lives will keep resembling the ones we curate on the phone. Shared, no-fuss meals will only work if we stop treating dinner as content, whether photos are allowed or not.
I agree that smartphones have costs and can be a drain on our attention (I'm enough of a Luddite that I severely limit my toddler's access to screens), but your complaints about people using them in social situations just don't resonate with me. We're about the same age, since I was also in high school in 2007, and in my experience, among people over 30 there's already a pretty strong taboo against using phones in social situations. This may be different for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Actually, the worst culprit in my personal life is my 72-year-old mother-in-law, and she constantly gets grief from her family about it.
On a different note, this piece is introvert erasure! Not everyone's vision of the good life involves going to social events every weekend. Also: dress codes for men? Really? I'm detecting some notes of social conservatism, which is fine, but again doesn't resonate with this liberal.
That was a really long way to say "I am a Luddite".
I don't know how old the author is, but if you remembered the original iPhone reveal event in '07 then you're probably not as incessantly online as people in their teens and 20s are today. Remembering what the "before times" were like is a kind of experiential recall that allows older folks to check ourselves and attempt to revert back to a less distracted mode of living.
But what are college-aged adults and younger people supposed to do? They very literally grew up with phones and tablets in front of them at all times. And the social norms that developed around them — non-stop communication via messaging apps, online gaming, and filming a performative simulacrum of one's life — are not going to be easily hand-waved away.
I hate the distractions of our phone-addled modernity (and the looming threats of govt. and corporate data collection) as much as anyone, but the list of what we *should* be doing instead of looking at our phones strikes me as kind of elitist.
That said, lmk where the no-bluetooth-speaker hiking trails are and I'll meet you there.
I'm not feeling any of this. It's easy to forget how things used to be before cellphones. It was so easy to disconnect and lose touch with people.
Endless boredom in practice meant sitting around watching hours of TV every day. 20 minutes of commercials for each hour of programming. Hope you enjoy re-runs.
The challenge to read the whole article feels a little weird. Probably a large majority of articles on here are read on phones.
If I'm at a party and someone checks their phone, I try to remember that I don't need to be the center of attention at every moment.
Here, here!
The PSA thing is kinda interesting. I could be wrong, but weren't there a lot of PSAs in the mid-20th century about social etiquette? This has a legit public health reason too, so I think it makes all the sense in the world to start suggesting some social etiquette and boundaries when it comes to phone usage.
Rude, yes. But also shameful.
First — rudeness is a distinctive kind of normative attitude that expresses a feeling of being wronged by someone. Intuitively, there are going to be many cases of phone use in social settings where bystanders don't feel wronged, but would still like to express their disapproval. Shame is the attitude here, expressed in all the usual ways — a scoff, a snort, a smile, a shake of the head, a stare.
Second — rudeness only sanctions phone use in social settings. If most excessive phone use happens solo, rudeness won't enable us to express the wrongness in that. Shame is the operative attitude to cover those cases, but it's less clear how to enact it. What types of practices would enable us to allocate shame and esteem over phone use in that solo time? The first thing I think of is, ironically, posting a photo of your weekly screen time showing a daily average under 2 hours. Clearly that ain't it, so what could be?
Finally — it's fairly intuitive to understand why excessive social use is either rude, shameful or both. You've done so here — and I think most folks recognize these arguments even if they haven't fully accepted them. But to explain why excessive solo use is shameful, we need different kinds of explanations. There has to be some kind of explanation that grounds the wrongness in its effect on your flourishing. You become less attentive, your conscientiousness decreases, you impair your ability to plan and execute on goals. You wreck your dopamine system. You develop bad taste. You waste your life. You also need to convince people that other people can tell — just based on their behavior — whether they spend too much time on screens solo.
PS — don't let your friends text and drive. If you're in the car with them, ask them to stop. If you see someone staring into their lap while driving... idk. Honk? Grab a clip from your dashcam and post to social media? I'm not sure how to best address this behavior, but it's clearly a present danger.