boiling frogs
is it getting hot in here?
In 2nd grade, I was in the slow reading class. My ADHD wouldn’t be diagnosed for another 10 years, and focusing long enough to string sentences together didn’t come naturally.
My parents got me a tutor. After school, I walked 20 minutes to the little yellow-house-turned-tutoring office on Madison Avenue. There, Lydia would wait for me with her short curly hair and a brilliant smile. Her fingers were long and slender, and her skin was so smooth it made me uncomfortable to look at.
She taught me how to follow the thread, read out loud, and when my mind jumped around the page, how to patiently get back on track. She also picked stories that placed a kid my age in some kind of adventure, the odds stacked against them—Edwardian orphans overcoming the poverty and criminal underworld of the London slums, or girls denied an education who forged their intellects despite the limitations society tried to impose on them.
As my skill in reading grew, I feel in love with the worlds held inside each book. It was an immersive joy to escape into complex, vast worlds of magical lands or imaginative futures, where characters solved interesting problems on other planets.
I would spend entire days on the faded blue couch in the living room, reading, getting up only for the bathroom or a snack, devouring hundreds of pages until my adventure partners and I reached the end of their story.
Social media hadn’t been created yet, and books were a rich, nourishing portal to somewhere else.
After slogging through tomes of nonfiction in college and then too many years consuming self-improvement books, I burned out on reading. I blamed my ADHD, thinking it was too hard for me to sit down and actually read a physical book. I relied entirely on audiobooks to get my literary fix.
Then my Honey and I gently started divesting from online spaces. We got off social media platforms and removed time-sucking apps from our devices. We didn’t realize how much of our own lives we had been missing out on until all that time and space were no longer disappearing into a screen like bathwater down a drain.
We all used to be the protagonists of our own lives rather than an audience member in someone else’s.
When The End arrives, none of us will wish we had spent more time on our phones, tablets, watching reels, or binging YouTube videos.
We will wish we had sat in the garden listening to the birds gossip.
We will wish we’d spent more time enjoying the texture of bread dough between our fingers.
We will wish we’d cherished watching just one more sunset.
We will wish we had spent more dinners asking our friends about their lives and sharing our own vulnerable truths.
We will wish we had said more kind things to strangers or gotten to know our neighbors more closely.
We will wish we danced more.
We’ll wish we had played with our dogs and snuggled with our cats just a few more times.
We will not wish for more time on screens and devices. And we will not wish that our phones had been part of all those experiences.
Why did I start this story talking about reading? Well, earlier this year, a friend sent me a lowbrow romantasy book in the mail, and I devoured it in just a few days.
It wasn’t my ADHD that had made it hard for me to read. It wasn’t my ADHD that made it hard to sit down, focus, and do just one thing at a time.
It was how I’d unconsciously rewired my brain via a combination of online social culture, using a device that not only allows but perpetuates doing a million things at once, and the fact that so many apps/platforms are designed to relentlessly capture and consume your attention.
Let me rephrase that: to capture and consume the precious moments you get to be alive on this planet.
When I quit scrolling and relying on my phone so heavily, I gave my neuroplasticity a chance to reset—to reestablish a slower, simpler, more spacious, more regulated norm.
Did my brain miss the dopamine hits? Of course. Did I catch myself making up stories about missing out on stuff? That too. Did I worry that about being out of touch with current events? Yes. Did I generate low-grade anxiety about losing track of things or forgetting stuff? Yup.
But then I reminded myself that BILLIONS of people lived and operated before the invention of these mobile tethers. They lived creative, dynamic, fulfilling lives before smart devices ever came to be.
What I can’t name right now is even one thing I’ve actually missed out on or lost track of that really mattered. And certainly nothing more interesting or worthwhile than being a protagonist in my own life again.
Seventy years ago, people started their workday off with a cocktail at 9:00 in the morning. Just because it was normal and a lot of people did it didn’t mean that it wasn’t poisonous to their health, happiness, and connection.
Likewise, people used to smoke on airplanes, but that didn’t mean that cigarettes weren’t harmful or addictive.
Just because “everybody” spends minutes, often hours, on their screens consuming social media, tracking another thing that all of a sudden needs tracking, compulsively checking their email, streaming—TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix, Hulu, the list goes on and on—doesn’t mean they aren’t poisonous, addictive, and harmful. They are in fact all designed to addict you.
If you catch yourself feeling resistant to this idea, why not take a month-long break, or even a week? Most people can’t even imagine a day without their smart device on their person. If taking even a small break feels impossible or raises feelings of defensiveness, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that sounds a lot like addiction.
And all addictions are thieves. Thieves of time. Thieves of connection. Thieves of presence. Thieves of your peace of mind. Thieves of Life.
I know I’ve written about this before, and the last thing I want is for you to feel shame. Quite the opposite. My goal is to shake you into a moment of self-reflection and awareness. Offer you an uncomfortable question that might help you take a pivotal pause and reimagine how technologically saturated your life currently is, and ask yourself if your relationship with devices is contributing to the vision you have for your life… or not.
For me, it wasn’t. The algorithmically driven feeds (they even call it a FEED!) made me feel like a goose in a foie gras factory, except that I was the one hooking myself up to the force feeder. I was the one carrying the anxiety-inducing, FOMO-inducing, time-devouring funnel around in my own pocket. I was giving these mega-corporations a direct leash into the most private moments of my life—in my living room on my couch, in my bed, in my hotel room, in my car next to my partner—to absorb my time, influence my thinking, and antagonize my perception of my neighbors. I was investing in my own manipulation. These mega-corporations are not invested in my mental health and quality of life. There end all be all goal is to extract money from me by selling me stuff, and the more they can keep me on their platforms, the more opportunity they have to make money off of me me. They see me as a “sale,” a commodity, a unit to extract profit from.
Do you spend more time watching television than going on walks, getting coffee with friends, or meditating outside? Do you track your screentime? How many HOURS a day of your one precious life are you siphoning away into a digital thing?
If you leave your phone in another room or at home when you go out, does this cause you anxiety? Interrogate this dependency. Ask if having this level of reliance on a device is truly important to you and something you want to continue practicing.
If you’re an overachiever and you really want to challenge yourself, you can always ask someone you trust to tell you hard truths about what they’ve noticed about your digital habits. It probably won’t be fun! (It was hard for me to listen to and I don’t even think “that bad”. Sound familiar??)
What did you do before you had a smartphone? Were you happier then? Did you spend more time being creative? Making music? Writing poetry? Reading? Gardening? Cooking? If so, maybe the “convenience” of having everything at your fingertips all the time is costing you more than you think.
Don’t be complicit. Taking your time back is an act of protest. Don’t let these corporations hijack your brain chemistry or your Life.
Consider divesting from so much reliance on these devices and digital spaces that have a diminishing return in the value they contribute to your life. It turns out that convenience can be costly. What is it costing you?
More Reading - Digital Detox:
The Light Phone - My Honey and I have pre-ordered the Light Phone III. We’ve decided that we don’t want to be a smart-phone house. We don’t want our children to have to compete with our phone for our attention. We don’t want companies to be able to disrupt our train of thought with notifications. We don’t want our time and presence to be up for grabs to the highest, most frequent bidder. Maybe you want to think about making the switch too.
We will keep one smartphone or tablet to use in specific circumstances - like travel - which are becoming more and more app-based. Otherwise, we will reserve looking things up online for when we are already at a computer. We will use pen and paper to write down things we need to remember. We are also working on getting a corded landline (because we live on a rural island now) and the power/internet going out is a real possibility.
The thing that makes me saddest about this shift is how many people around us struggle to imagine their lives without a smart phone. Trust me. You will be great, if not amazing, and you will figure it out very quickly once you realize that your sense of dependence on it is a mirage.
What is social media addiction? “While social media can seem like mindless and relaxing fun, it actually has a significant effect on your brain…When you experience more dopamine after using social media, your brain identifies this activity as a rewarding one that you ought to repeat. Such a reaction may be more felt whenever you make a post of your own and gain positive feedback… Thus, as the feel-good dopamine wears off, you’ll go back to the source (in this case, social media) for more.” I would argue that if you can’t “take a week off” from something like social media or streaming videos, then that is an unhealthy relationship with those platforms.
Research suggests that passive screen time alters our brains and can cause Digital Dementia. “Digital Dementia” is a term used “to describe cognitive changes associated with technology overuse… excess technology use can lead to dementia-like changes and possibly even increase dementia risk... [and] negatively impacts executive functioning.”
How to do a Digital Detox - whether you are ready to break-up with your smart device and favorite content platforms, or not, most of us would probably benefit from from a little less reliance.
Other Little Extras:
Books for Prisoners is a Seattle-base nonprofit that supplies books to incarcerated people. Like Andrew Carnegie, I believe that everyone deserves to have access to books, both fiction and nonfiction. My local bookstore is participating in raising awareness and funds for the organization, and they have a wishlist of book requests from people who are incarcerated. I just donated 5. Would you consider paying for 1?
A song I keep returning to lately: