The world is drowning in social media. According to the first random sources I could find, the average American now spends over 4 hours a day on their phone, 2 hours of which are spent on social media. That’s one quarter of a person’s waking life devoted to a screen. So why are people compelled to give their lives up to thousands of pixels when such a rich world awaits outside?
Originally, social media was literally a medium for social interaction, and that drew us in. It would be so much easier to connect and share and “ooh look, I have 500 friends!” But as the loneliness epidemic has proven, social media has drained and derailed the organic ways we meet and make friends. Now more than ever, the youngest generations are struggling with social anxiety caused at least in part by spending so much less time having “real” interactions. Now even time spent together is often time spent apart as everyone pulls out their phones. We’re lucky to remember a time before this insanity.
By now you’re likely familiar with the fact that tech companies pour billions of dollars into developing the most addictive products possible, optimizing every millimeter of screen space to get the primate on the other side to click or swipe. To boot, people create so much incredible, entertaining content that it’s hard to look away.
Armed with the hard earned wisdom of two decades of social media (yes it’s been that long), we’re disillusioned with the idea that checking Instagram is going to result in any lasting or meaningful social interaction. Yet, conditioned as we are by years of practice, our habits have not caught up with our concepts.
To make things harder, the false promise of social media intertwines with an honest social impulse. Our phones are where we get texts from real friends. They’re where we make calls to our mothers. Pictures of our pets and kids are on there.
The result is that when the desire for social interaction arises, we default to checking our phones. And once our eyes land on the screen, those billions of dollars in psychological research get to work ensnaring us.
So what can be done?
Pay attention to the moment you go to check your phone. Why did you move to unlock it? If the answer is social, wonder about better ways to build fulfilling relationships. Most often, the best thing that can be done to improve a friendship doesn’t involve your phone. Uninstall the apps you know cause harm. There are great things to see and hear on there, but are they worth it? You’d probably rather spend your time elsewhere. Make the apps you keep less appealing. The two methods I’ve found most effective are — tracking screen time through your device’s native screen time widget, and enabling grayscale through the accessibility settings.
Choose a behavior to replace the phone-checking impulse with. For example: checking a hand-written task list. When you next notice an impulse to check your phone, re-direct your attention to the list instead. Over time, the behavior is retrained.
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