How I Learned That I Haven’t Learned Much

Before I even finished reading Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, about the modern plague of short attention spans, I began plotting how to apply Hari’s insights. There wasn’t one single answer to this question. Hari rejects the individualistic attitude, that dwindling focus is each person’s moral failing, believing instead that evidence shows this is a product of policy choices and commercial greed. We’ll only address this problem, Hari insists, by banding together to confront the source.

Nevertheless, Hari agrees individuals can take certain steps to begin the process of evicting the corporate squatters from our brains. One such step he calls “precommitment,” deliberately deciding on a specific step and applying it consciously. Precommitment isn’t something vague; it doesn’t mean declaring “I won’t spend four hours noodling on my phone after work.” After all, though that’s a fine-sounding sentiment, it lacks concrete steps: how will I avoid getting sucked into that routine?

For me, it involved a simple vow: I wouldn’t let my phone into my bedroom anymore. My reasoning was simple. On getting home from work, tired and incoherent from a day’s exertions, and changing out of my work clothes, I’ve developed a habit of flopping onto my bed and browsing my phone to decompress. This inevitably descends into a doom-spiral of FaceTube and InstaTwit, and though I always promise myself otherwise, it lasts for hours.

Hari singles out bedtime phone-scrolling as a major contributor to insomnia and mental health struggles. The light levels on phone screens, especially in darkened rooms, disrupts our circadian rhythms. He doesn’t acknowledge that phone manufacturers know this; most smartphones anymore come with night mode, a setting that filters light, particularly the most disruptive blue-wave light. If the physiological complaints were the only problem with in-bed phone browsing, well, the technology mavens already fixed that problem.

For me, though, the problem ran deeper. My body, my eyes, don’t respond to the phone; it's my sense of time. The suffusion of social media into my private time creates the expectation that something will happen imminently. As a sprout, I hated being ordered to bed, because I thought something exciting would happen after I fell asleep: something fun on TV, or guests stopping by, or whatever. My phone fills that role in adulthood.

Johann Hari

Here’s the thing: it worked! It didn’t solve the problem of coming home fatigued and incoherent, certainly. But when I did, and flopped on my bed in t-shirt and jeans, I was confronted with the present. Instead of the expectant promise that something fun would happen soon, I existed right now. As I wondered what to do with that present, my eyes landed on the pile of books I’ve bought and hoarded without reading them.

I read Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel, How High We Go In the Dark, in under 48 hours. I don’t believe I’ve read anything that fast since the pandemic began. Without my phone to create distractions that somebody might say something funny, uplifting, or personally meaningful on social media, I was present enough to read an entire book. I felt refreshed. My mind felt cleansed of the detritus from ten years of instantly available brain candy.

Then I did whatever anybody, flush with the heady excitement of secular enlightenment, does: I got smug about myself. I began preparing my presentation about my life-changing insight. In my head, I was already writing my self-righteous TED Talk about making small changes and achieving great outcomes. I patted myself on my back, told myself I’d done it, and began planning my new sideline career evangelizing the power of small lifestyle changes for big results.

So smug was I, that I stopped enforcing my precommitment. Having banned my phone from my bedroom, I started doom-scrolling in the living room. Then, because I was listening to an audiobook on my phone, I decided that this time doesn’t count, and carried it into the bedroom. While listening, I opened a game, to occupy my eyes while my ears listened. Next thing I knew, three hours passed, and I remembered nothing I’d heard.

My problem, I’m realizing, isn’t my phone. Though my phone channels my human tendency toward passivity, it’s secondary. My problem begins because, like most humans, I desire to minimize resistance in life, to coast on momentum. When jobs, social connections, and hobbies provide momentum, our passive time is, in some way, creative. But when technology substitutes present reward for an undefined future, I passively miss the present. Clearly, I still have so much to learn.