All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," the philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, in 1654. According to Screen Time, a recent addition to the iPhone's operating system that purports to help users deal with the addiction to screens which the iPhone is designed to foster, my typical daily phone activity includes ninety minutes of texting, one hour of reading, another hour of e-mail, yet another hour of social media, and about seventy "pickups," meaning that I check my phone about four times per hour. I carry my phone around with me as if it were an oxygen tank. I stare at it while I make breakfast and take out the recycling, ruining what I prize most about working from home - the sense of control, the relative peace. I have tried all sorts of things to look at screens less often: I don't get push notifications or use Facebook or watch Instagram stories; on my home computer, I have installed a browser plug-in called StayFocusd, which turns off Twitter after forty-five minutes of daily use. On my phone, I use an app called Freedom to block social media for much of the workday. If any of my digital chastity belts malfunction, I start scrolling like a junkie, pulling myself away just long enough to send frantic e-mails to the apps' customer service with subject lines like "Freedom not working!"
- posted
4 years ago
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