About eighteen months ago, I decided I wanted a healthier relationship with my smartphone. My phone had become a fixture in every aspect of my life. I kept it on my desk when I worked, in my pocket during meals, and by my bedside when I slept. I brought it with me to church, to the gym, to the bathroom. I realized that there was scarcely a moment in my day or night when this tantalizing device wasn’t within arm’s reach.
I’ve discovered that I was hardly exceptional in this regard. And if I had chosen to keep my phone by my side for every minute of every day for the rest of my life, nobody would have stopped me or even particularly judged me for it. If anything, the social pressure is in the other direction, toward an ever-greater expectation that I should have my phone on me at all times. But I knew I didn’t want this.
I resented the way my phone had become an idol in my life. I had begun to treat it like Bilbo’s ring: as my precious, magical object, from which I must never be parted—and which left me anxiously checking my pockets every time I feared I had misplaced it. I had the growing sense that even if my relationship with my phone wouldn’t be the difference between heaven and hell, it would be the difference between a more and a less fulfilled life.
My day was increasingly full of what Stephen Covey calls quadrant III tasks: “urgent but not important.” Whether I was replying to messages, checking notifications, or catching the latest Jordan Peterson clip, I constantly found myself addressing things that clamored for my attention but didn’t actually matter. The anxiety that resulted was compounded by the effect on my sleep. It wasn’t uncommon for me to spend an hour each night scrolling YouTube.
My dependence on my smartphone was also interfering with my intellectual work. My attention span was shorter, my memory was weaker, and I had stopped reading literature. When I tried to engage in serious reading or writing, I found that my phone gave me not just an avenue for distraction, but a craving for it. My interior life was affected. I rarely had the willpower to set my phone aside during prayer time, with the result that my meditation was invariably interrupted and scattered. My phone was exerting more control over my freedom than I cared to admit, and it was feeding many of my vices. Although I had downloaded Covenant Eyes a few years earlier as a protection against porn, the fact is that immodesty and softcore pornography still abound on social media. None of this was helpful for me. Neither was the vainglory that social media inevitably brings, nor the envy I felt upon seeing everyone else sharing their picture-perfect lives.
If my phone facilitated one vice above all others, it was acedia. In so many ways, my phone was fueling my laziness, robbing me of contemplation, and cultivating my boredom. Boredom—a word that does not even appear in Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary—was the one thing my phone promised to solve, yet here I was feeling more bored (and boring) than ever. Like an opioid addict, I kept returning to a drug that brought momentary relief of my symptoms while worsening my underlying condition.
I am not alone in these struggles. Recently I circulated a short survey among my social circle. I received 140 responses from people aged sixteen to thirty-five, split evenly between men and women. Nearly all of the respondents are practicing Christians, and when asked to describe their relationship to their smartphones, 40 percent answered either “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy.” Just 7 percent answered “very healthy (the relationship is close to where I want it to be).” Evidently I’m not the only one with a desire for healthier tech habits.
When asked how many of their waking hours they spent more than six feet away from their phones, one in six respondents answered “about 0 hours,” with another 22 percent reporting “less than 1 hour,” and a further 20 percent “less than 2 hours.” Meanwhile, 40 percent said they unlocked their phones more than seventy-five times each day—once every thirteen minutes during their waking hours. When asked to name the biggest disadvantages they experience as the result of owning a smartphone, both sexes emphasized time-wasting, reduced self-control, and shorter attention spans. Men tended to highlight struggles with laziness, lust, and impaired sleep. Women were more likely to mention anxiety, loss of self-esteem, and failing to be present to the people around them.
You never hear these complaints applied to simpler forms of technology. Nobody accuses a spoon of inducing laziness. Nobody complains that a bicycle, or a radio, is affecting their relationships. It seems that all technologies are not created equal. More than thirty years ago, in his book Technopoly, Neil Postman asked, “Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?” Though Postman perhaps did not anticipate a time when most of us would be carrying computers in our pockets and, increasingly, on our wrists, he foresaw the enormous impact the computer would have on the way we think and act.
A point of importance for Postman is that no technology is entirely neutral. And though some technologies fulfill a narrow function by responding to a specific need, others are wide-ranging in their implications. Every technological change, moreover, has an “ecological” impact, akin to a caterpillar entering a greenhouse. The end result is not a greenhouse plus a caterpillar, but a completely different kind of greenhouse. Likewise, greater access to the contraceptive pill doesn’t merely give adults more license in the bedroom; it also radically alters our social mores, the way the sexes interact, and the way we think about children.
None of this answers the question of what we should do about our phones. But it does suggest that we need to think more lucidly about the subtle ways in which our phones alter our relationships, our psyches, our language, and our culture. No doubt smartphones have become a fact of life, and most of us can’t get rid of them without risking our jobs or causing serious inconvenience to those around us. Yet I would argue that most of us can and should be more radical in restricting our interactions with these devices.
For me, it involved a number of practical steps. First, I used a software called Freedom to block all browsing on my phone between 9:00 in the evening and 8:00 in the morning. Although this restriction can be inconvenient at times, it’s not as bad as you might think, and the sacrifice is worth it. Second, I left all social media with the exception of YouTube, which I cut down by 90 percent. To do this, I used Freedom to block both the YouTube website on my laptop and the app on my phone. I can still access YouTube on my phone browser, but I installed the Unhook Chrome extension and unsubscribed from all channels, thus transforming the YouTube home page into a blank search bar. Did I feel a certain FOMO in taking each of these steps? Undoubtedly. But within a few weeks, I found that I hardly missed the old content that used to consume so much of my time.
Third and fourth, I started putting my phone out of sight whenever I was working, and I stopped keeping my phone in my bedroom at night. To this end, I bought an alarm clock, and I started a book club with friends to motivate me to read more literature in the evenings. Finally, I began habituating myself to not bringing my phone with me everywhere and to using it less in the presence of other people. As my friends and family can attest, this part is a work in progress. But I have found it liberating to remind myself that my phone doesn’t need to be with me all the time. It can stay behind when I go downstairs for dinner, when I go to church, or when I go for a walk. As soon as I stopped making excuses to myself, I realized that I could thrive without my phone—and resist the tyranny of quadrant III—far more than I had previously thought possible.
I am not a Luddite. I still use my smartphone every day; I pay for Spotify premium; I own a smartwatch; I use an electric toothbrush. My contention is not that we must all abandon our smartphones tomorrow. No, my contention is simply that between blind techno-optimism and implausible Luddism there lies the path of techno-pragmatism. We can acknowledge the value of modern technology while also recognizing that in a society as technocratic as ours, radical means may be necessary in order to achieve a normal life. Interestingly, it seems to be Generation Z—my generation, full of people who never knew or barely remember a time before smartphones—that is leading the way on techno-pragmatism.
More generally, fixing our relationship with modern technology will involve rejecting the acedia that defines our age. Doing so demands courage (“To escape boredom and avoid effort are incompatible,” Theodor Adorno warned) and a conscious retrieval of the lost art of leisure, which Josef Pieper described as “a form of stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear.” Being faithful disciples in the twenty-first century means re-immersing ourselves in the world of real things and real beauty. It means blocking out the noise that surrounds us and rediscovering the still, small voice of the Spirit.
One more point bears emphasizing. Despite the promise of greater “connection,” perhaps the greatest casualty of the digital revolution has been friendship. If the studies are to be believed, thirty years ago a majority of men reported having six or more close friends, whereas today that number has been halved. Fifteen percent of men now say they have no close friends at all. Reversing the harmful effects of modern technology begins with our once again prizing friendship for the priceless jewel that it is. Until we learn to re-invest in Christian community, our efforts to lead lives of virtue in the modern world will remain stunted.
At the end of his book, Postman offers a loose prescription for those looking to challenge the technopoly. He urges readers to become “loving resistance fighters.” Postman was referring to love for America, with all its traditions and symbols, but I propose applying his label more broadly. We should become loving resistance fighters against the technocratic powers that exert so much influence over our lives. But let our resistance be guided by a love not for America alone but for all of God’s creation: for the real things of this world, for frail human beings, and for that life of freedom and friendship to which every heart aspires.
