​My Smartphone addiction

How many times a day do we check our smartphone?  
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It's time for a real confession.

For the Average American, the number is 52.  My number is 139 (according to my iPhone monitoring system).  

When I ask my friends about their relationships with their smartphones, they all tell me that they have tried to limit their smartphone usage, but only some of them succeeded in cutting back. 

Cal Newport, a professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, in his new book "Digital Minimalism:  Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World"  explains that our phones use is really getting in the way of too much of our lives.   The main criticism is that we are losing our freedom.

The truth is we keep going to our phones, more than we think is useful, more than we think is healthy, and to the exclusion of things we know are more important. 

Well, this is called smartphone addiction.  The book calls it "moderate behavioral addiction" .  It means if we have it around, we are probably going to use it more than is healthy.  This is exactly the definition suits our current relationship with our phone:  the feeling of wanting to look at it or have it in our hands or handy at all times.  (By the way, I'm guilty of it BIG Time)

Let's look at a few apps that we use nowadays.  In fact, things have definitely become worse.  A big part of this is that the user experience of social media was re-engineered so that it would encourage more compulsive use.   Look at Facebook 10 years ago, when I joined it.  It was an experience that's very different than Facebook today (I haven't been a member since 2013).  Ten years ago, we were looking at our friend's profiles.  Today, it is this constant stream of rich reward, likes, @ tags and @ comments, that are coming at us all day  24/7, that we have to keep compulsively checking.  

The big question is why should we cut back on time spent on our phones?

SOLITUDE.  Losing the time to reflect and be alone with our thoughts is one of the greatest undetected outcomes of what we have engineered in the digital age.   When we struggle to step away from our screens, we are missing out on activities that are "crucial to a flourishing, functional human life"  - such as taking time to self-reflect, having a face-to-face conversation with someone or simply being bored.  

The author tells us this SOLITUDE factor might sound intolerable to the modern smartphone, sort of, infected individual, but it's absolutely crucial to reset in our mind, to have insight, to have true and successful self-reflection

The book makes excellent recommendations for all of us to cut back on constant scrolling.

STEP AWAY for 30 days and clear it all out.  We must try to get back in touch with what we really care about, what we want to spend our time on, and when we are done with the 30 days experience, we can rebuild our digital life from scratch, do it this time with real intention. 

I know it is difficult to commit to completely wiping out apps on our phone for a month.  So we can start by deleting any app in which a company makes a profit ever time we click on it.  We don't have to be extreme and cancel the service, but only use it when we're on a device other than a smartphone.  

We must reintroduce leisure activities we used to do before compulsively checking our devices - reading books, cooking, writing, visiting with friends, etc.  

To be a successful digital minimalist, we must evaluate how much time has been wasted skimming and tapping through our phone.  Also weighing cost over benefit.  By COST, the book tells us "What is the cost in terms of our life energy, our life force, and time we could be spending on something more important?"

The truth is that we are losing much of our humanity by always staring at these screens.  It's time to change it.  It's time to move from connections to conversations. 

Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough.   We need it more than ever before in our digital lives.