Do people really want to quit their smartphone? I certainly don’t. It connects me to people, provides information, and lets me capture information when I want to. I do not feel overwhelmed by it. I do restrict notifications to specific apps and people. The rest, I check on a couple of times a day. Why would I want to quit?
I think a more accurate statement of the need is that people want their lives back, and the smartphone is a clear symbol of the ever-connected world, where not noticing a message for 15 minutes can turn into disaster, where you are expected to Always. Be. Available. That’s what people want out of, in my observations.
We talk about habituated phone users - people who sit there refreshing their social feed for 14 hours a day - and while these are troubling cases, I don’t think they represent the majority of people who say they want to give up their smartphone.
In which case there actual issue would be worker's rights, and once again a bunch of people have run off to fight the wrong battle because they're scared or can't even conceive of the real one.
I’ve been off and on into conlanging since I was a young child, and when the smartphone started becoming a thing with later Blackberries, Treos, and then with iPhone and Android, I began using the same word to mean leash and phone in most of my languages.
I have never allowed anyone to expect that kind of responsiveness from me, especially 24x7. The closest you get would be phone calls from my spouse and even then, if I’m in meetings I may not respond an hour or so and that’s not a cause for concern. At work, I have all notifications turned off except for badges or meeting notices. Even then I only check things like Slack or email at most once an hour.
People don’t want to quit smartphones, they want to quit what’s in them and that can be hard. Sometimes you just have apps that are a time sink. You can obviously delete them and call it a day, but sometimes you want to keep it around for a small use case, but then want to limit your usage to a minimum, which can be hard because these apps are literally designed to make you spend as much time on them as possible.
This triggers my "learn some self-discipline" instinct.
It's such a learned helplessness statement "oh no, I can't possibly not open the reddit app 30 times a day. Save me from myself."
Like, I get it, it's not easy but it's also a pretty basic part of being an adult. Like brushing your teeth, eating healthily or doing exercise (which is to say: if you think "I have problems with those too" then the problem really isn't your smartphone).
This is like saying to addicts “Just stop smoking crack”.
Everyone knows smoking crack is bad for you. A lot of people want to quit but are unable to no matter how much “self discipline” they have. And app developers have teams of people dedicated to making sure you stay on these apps longer and longer.
Your smartphone is in absolutely no way like smoking a physically addictive hard narcotic.
Again: learned helplessness. You've picked a comparison to ensure that you have maximally separated any notion of your own culpability. Drug addicts who get clean start by recognizing that they made the choice to start, and need to be mindful of the choice to quit, outside the physical addictions which drive it.
The answer for them isn't "I need the crack dealers to all go away first".
Addiction to smartphones, porn, shopping, eating, coffee, gambling etc. all work on the same neurological pathways. While it’s not the same as a drug addiction, “just don’t do it” isn’t that straightforward. People have to go to therapy and rehab to get rid of some of these, but somehow when it comes to smartphones, the opinion is that “it’s not that hard”.
People can go to therapy and rehab for being addicted to their smartphones, but all of those things are voluntary activities. You have to choose that you want to get better.
Externalizing the locus of your problems is itself a pathology: "I receive too many notifications from social media apps" in a normal person leads to "so I just silenced them all" or "that's why I don't install social media apps, who needs that?".
The first thing anyone does in this topic though is externalize the problem: it's not a problem with them, it's a problem with the broadest possible generalization of a thing. They're not incapable of having a smartphone, everyone is.
People fail therapy and rehab all the time because of that expectation mismatch: you don't go in and "they fix you", you go in and put in the work to fix yourself, with some assistance.
If a factory is polluting the air, the water, if you can't sleep because it makes loud noises at night, you don't tell people they should get air masks, or water filters, or take melatonin, or to just move somewhere else.
If you live in an area that a corporation is about to deforest, you don't just tell individuals to just plant a tree.
If you live in an area where traffic lights don't work, the streets are full of pot holes, you don't tell people to just drive better and get a jeep, or to just walk places.
The internet is a shared space, and you have to consider who you're siding with and why. You initially said this "triggers your learn self discipline" response. Did you stop and ponder why you have that trigger and why you feel so strongly about shifting the onus from powerful corporations towards individuals?
"The internet" is as present in my life as I want it to be. No one is forcing you to install apps which notify you, or to post on social media. That's your choice.
Thus proving my original point: the immediate reaction is to try and externalize the problem, despite the fact that it is entirely being driven by your own choices.
You've carefully constructed your example once again to make yourself the idle victim: powerless against those evil corporations who are just forcing those alluring social media sites on to you. As though you exert no control or dominion over your smartphone or it's applications, or how you use them.
"Alcohol is as present in my life as I want it to be. No one is forcing alcoholics to drink or to buy wine. That's their choice."
Given that you ignored pretty much all of my points and instead doubled down on your bootstraps mentality I'm just gonna say your empathy is very atrophied.
The language of addiction is psychological language that may leave people feeling hopeless, particularly if they view themselves as biologically-chemically determinative beings.
Perhaps the language of idolatry as used in the Bible (reflecting thousands of years in the Jewish and Christian traditions) may be more helpful. What many see as addictions may in fact be an underlying spiritual condition of serving something as an idol, or a God-substitute. The only way to break that is repentance, turning from the idolatry to the living God. But this gives hope, because as people we are able to do exactly that.
We are more that a bag of matter and energy. We can exercise responsibility over our actions.
The doctrine if sin and the language if idolatry actually can give hope, as the possibility of repentance and belief is always there.
You can substitute it with any addiction. Try replacing it with porn instead. It doesn’t matter. Your analysis is cruel and lacks empathy into how addiction actually works.
You wouldn’t tell a depressed person to just stop being depressed either and that they lack the discipline to be happy.
Except crack and other drugs form physical dependencies which leads to withdrawal. Smart phone addicts have a more psychological battle. That's the willpower/self-discipline part. How do you build discipline? Practice! So, yeah, it can be as simple as telling yourself "just stop using the apps" as often as you can to build up the skill.
Conversely there's aspects of screens that are not present in crack, such as widespread acceptance and even encouragement, hijacking of our most prioritized sense organ, etc.
If you were to design a visual drug, as a concept, you wouldn't get very far from the current state of affairs.
It's now well known and accepted knowledge that "addictions" have heritable elements (specifically in the transition from initial to problematic use). This has been proven by repeated studies of families and twins.
The preponderance of substance abuse addicts in recovery that "swap the witch for the bitch" and adopt behavioural addictions also support the genetic basis for addictability (my word).
I am a behavioural addict in recovery (4442 days today) and when I consider my siblings, parents, their siblings and their children (my first cousins), there's a >50% incidence of addiction to either smoking (>2 packs/day), alcohol, sex, food, gambling, or drug use. Half of that cohort have more than one addiction and among those almost all share a substance addiction with a behavioural addiction.
I appreciate that this is just one family and is statistically irrelevant. However because I've been around people dealing with their addictions for so long and spoken to so many, this is not an uncommon familial pattern among addicts.
I'd also add that in my clan there are many instances where one sibling is an addict and another isn't. This is not learned behaviour (though the introduction to addictive pathways/behaviours etc is often as a result of environmental and psycho-social factors).
I’m not sure what your point is here. The adult thing to do if you’re an addict is to move as far away from your addiction as possible. That is what self discipline looks like.
