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bradley13 writes:

Interesting article on smartphone addiction, written by a 45-year-old who suffered from it.

We touch our smartphones -- tap, click, swipe -- more than 2,500 times a day. That's probably 100 times more often than we touch our partner. The reason we do it is that the phone constantly demands attention by sending us notifications. It does so every time someone wants to connect with us, every time something changes in an app, every time an artificially intelligent entity decides we need information. Notifications have a barely veiled commercial purpose: Once we start playing with the phone, we're likely to open more apps, see more ads, buy more stuff.

It's relatively easy to retake control; I went into my phone's settings and banned every one of the 112 apps from sending notifications. Now, I only check my personal and corporate email accounts, as well as two messenger apps, when I want to, not when my device wants me to. That means my friends must wait longer than they used to for a response. They haven't noticed -- or at least they haven't commented on it. We overestimate the need for immediacy in communication; perhaps our kids don't because they live their addiction to a greater extent than we do, but an adult finds it easy to wait for a response.

Recovering addicts know it's impossible to be perfectly clean: Even if you don't use your favorite substance, you miss it. At the end of his opium essay, Cocteau wrote wistfully that perhaps "the young" might someday discover "a regime that would allow one to keep the benefits of the poppy" without getting addicted. That remains impossible for drugs but maybe not for smartphones.

I can sympathize. I went through a massively stressful period a couple of years ago, which involved being on-call for a project basically 24/7. Continuous status notifications and emails. This got me into the habit of leaving those notifications on, and every time any sort of message arrived, I'd check the phone, which would lead to using the phone, even if the message itself was unimportant.

The continuous flood of interruptions makes you feel needed, important, connected, or whatever. It also destroys your ability to concentrate (when working), or to participate in your family's life (when at home). Turning off all notifications was a very, very good thing...

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