Nothingness
July
25 2021
There
is no time for nothing.
Or
at least not enough.
When
I was kid
I
remember feeling mildly embarrassed
that
I'd read business as busy-ness;
I
was a precocious reader
and
this lapse disappointed me.
But
now I see how prescient I was,
a
time when we see being busy as a virtue
and
distraction as the key
to
happiness.
When
we shake our heads disapprovingly
at
that day-dreaming kid
with
her head in the clouds
whom
we're all so sure
will
amount to nothing much.
But
like her
there
is virtue in being present
and
letting your mind wander.
Who
knows where it will take you
or
whether you'll ever come back.
This
is alchemy
voodoo
science
the
metaphysics of the mind;
conjuring
something out of nothingness,
a
universe
from
a singularity
too
tiny to imagine.
There
was a terrific piece in this weekend's Globe about turning off
our phones (see below). I stole the opening line from it: a sentence
that employs the perilous double negative, but ends up making eminent
good sense.
I
don't have a smartphone. I felt rather smug reading the article, the
same way I feel when I'm out and about and see all these heads
angled down, oblivious to their surroundings, eyes locked on screens
and thumbs twiddling.
Without
unstructured time and giving my mind space to wander, I would never
write a word of poetry. In the article, he mentions flow, and this
alchemy of the mind can't happen without it: a state of complete
immersion that annihilates the passage of time. I realize that
compared to the vast majority of people, I have the rare luxury of
time. But if time is such a scarce resource, why waste any of it on
mindless scrolling, the poison of the internet, toxic social
comparison?
Of
course, this wouldn't have so easily happened without our deep
cultural prejudice against “wasting time” in a North American
culture that valorizes work and productivity. Technology was supposed
to free us from toil and give us all unlimited leisure. Instead, in
the form of these infernal phones, it has encouraged us to not only
take our work home, but to fill our free time with unsatisfying
distraction.
Let’s
deal with our phone addictions. Here are three rules to follow
On
June 25, 1857, a few dozen men gathered in Biddulph Township, north
of London, Ont., to raise a local family’s barn. As was standard at
the time, the worksite lacked a barista but had a “grog boss,”
who dispensed whisky throughout the day. The booze was believed to
sustain the men’s vigour, but it often achieved the opposite. After
a particularly wet lunch that day, a pair of Irish immigrants, James
Donnelly and Patrick Farrell, engaged in fisticuffs. After an initial
tussle was broken up, Donnelly tacked back, fatally ending the
dispute with a logging handspike to Farrell’s head.
Such
barbarism was a sign of the times. For many, life in the 19th-century
New World was an endless open bar. Rum, whisky and beer flowed from
morning to night, consumed by men, women, even children. With
unfettered access to an addictive drug – and meagre understanding
of its risks – people behaved as you’d expect: They went
hog-wild.
Still,
by the time of the handspike incident, the temperance movement had
taken root, linking alcohol to a range of ills. Fast forward to today
– through prohibition, drunk-driving laws, Alcoholics Anonymous and
more – and we’ve developed a far healthier relationship to booze,
premised on a basic consensus about its proper and appropriate role
in our lives. We have developed norms – rules that govern our
attitudes and behaviours, shaping our understanding of where, when,
how and why to drink.
So,
on a weekday afternoon in April, 2020, as I fixed myself a Manhattan,
I thought to myself: Whoa. During the early lockdown roller coaster,
I, like others, found solace in alcohol. If I couldn’t go elsewhere
physically, at least I could neurochemically.
Still,
thanks to entrenched norms, I understood that my workday cocktail was
transgressive; I soon returned to the baseline of healthy moderation.
Alcohol may be a problem for many, but with an understanding of what
healthy looks like, there is a path to reform.
I
am far more concerned about a different addiction we’ve indulged in
over the past 16 months, this one with the abandon of 19th-century
barn-raisers: our phones.
Before
the COVID-19 pandemic, we were spending more than one in five waking
minutes looking at our phones.
Then,
screen-time became a virtue – stay home, scroll Insta, stop the
spread – and the only game in town. Phone use spiked; our devices
tightened their grip.
Today,
the neural pathways carved into our brains by so many buzzes, pings
and likes are more ingrained than ever. Our phone use is not merely
immoderate; it’s downright depraved.
We
use our phones at breakfast, lunch and dinner; while we’re talking
to our friends, our partners and our children. We use while we’re
working, while we’re watching movies, while we’re hiking in the
woods. We use until the moment we sleep, from the moment we wake –
and sometimes in between. We use in the bathroom and we use while we
drive. We use in front of our children, and then, when they become
tweens, we buy them their own phones, giving them a pocketsized
dopamine-dispenser as they enter the phase of life at which roughly
90 per cent of lifelong addictions begin.
Unlike
whisky, however, our phones are indispensable – sources of
information, convenience, connection and delight. No temperance
movement will save us, and even the fiercest latter-day Luddites
aren’t advocating for prohibition. But our phones’ inevitability
belies their perniciousness.
A
growing body of research affirms what we intuitively know: Phone use
degrades the quality of our sleep, our productivity and our
creativity. It is linked to heightened levels of anxiety and
depression, diminished sexual satisfaction, compromised childparent
relationships and so much more. But – as climate activists know –
even the most alarming studies won’t shift behaviour at scale. For
that to happen, culture itself needs to change. We need to update our
shared beliefs, attitudes and behaviours to define more clearly
where, when, how and why to use our phones. We need a new set of
norms.
Such
widespread societal change seldom comes easy. Yet sometimes it does.
The past 16 months have been a case study in norm reinvention, from
masking to greeting (hello elbow touch!) to fashion (goodbye hard
pants!). Today, as we emerge from lockdown, re-entering restaurants,
offices and homes, society is transforming once more. The moment is
ripe for change. And who doesn’t wish to return to real life with
maximum gusto? Who could justify visiting a beloved bar, and then
doing the exact same thing we’ve been doing on our couches for the
past 16 months?
Alcohol
norms remind us that it’s often undesirable to be drunk. Phone
norms should remind us that it’s often undesirable to be
distracted. Put differently, the cost of alcohol can be measured in
lost sobriety; the cost of phones can be measured in lost attention.
And attention, our capacity to focus, is perhaps our scarcest
commodity. According to the Stanford attention expert David Strayer,
unless you’re among the 2 per cent of the population he calls
“supertaskers,” it is literally impossible to pay attention to
more than one thing at a time. Multitasking, for 98 per cent of us,
is a myth. As the technology critic Howard Rheingold puts it,
“Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay
attention.”
We
know that distracted driving can cost lives. To understand the cost
of full-blown distracted living, we need to measure the gap between
attentional aspiration and attentional achievement. In other words,
by paying attention to where we pay attention, we can develop a
normative framework for phones that makes us happier, calmer and more
mindful. Call it enlightened self-interest: How can we ensure our
phones serve us and not the other way around? To achieve this – to
reckon properly with our pandemic drug of choice – we need to
establish boundaries. We need structure. We need rules.
Rule
No. 1: When paying attention to other people, we should not use our
phones.
The
pandemic has underscored the immeasurable benefits of face time over
FaceTime. Making eye contact, resting a hand on a shoulder, we can
connect most strongly, diving deep and achieving catharsis. Yet too
often, even when we’re together, our phones are still with us.
As
MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle writes, when a phone is in sight we are
“pausable.” With the looming prospect of our date raising a
finger and locking eyes sympathetically as they answer their phone –
or even just subtly glancing downward – it’s no wonder we might
prefer discussing the Kardashians’ deepest problems than our own.
Phones accentuate our vulnerability, a totem reminding us that
something-more-important could arise at any moment.
In
a study affirming this dynamic, Oxford Internet Institute researchers
prompted pairs of people with conversation topics, and divided them
into two. For the first group, researchers left a phone resting,
face-down, on a nearby desk. For the second group, the phone was
absent. After their conversations, pairs in the “phone present”
group reported far lower levels of empathy and trust than those in
the “phone absent” group. The researchers concluded the “mere
presence of mobile phones inhibited the development of interpersonal
closeness and trust.”
Phones
don’t just diminish our performance as friends; they also make us
inferior parents. It’s been nearly 50 years since the psychologist
Edward Tronick’s famous “Still-Face Experiments,” in which
mothers erase expression from their own faces, causing their infants
to become upset. We know that eye contact is integral to establishing
secure attachment in babies. Yet we replicate the still-face
experiment endlessly, using phones in front of our kids, and entering
what the psychologist Jesper Aagaard calls “a state of suspended
animation with all the vitality of a mannequin doll. Only the thumbs
are moving.”
Our
phones also make us impatient: A University of Michigan study found
the more deeply caregivers were absorbed in their phones, the more
likely they were to respond harshly to their children’s
attention-seeking behaviour. The magnetic draw of the phone
subjugates everything else – even a heartfelt appeal for parental
affection. When we return from phone-land, we are quicker to anger
than before, freshly frustrated by our attentional limitations,
seldom pausing to ask why our children should suffer for our
addiction.
If
we can admit, at least, that we can only truly do one thing at a
time, then the decision to stow away our phones, and focus on our
friends, or children, or colleagues, should become obvious. And if we
must use our phones, let’s do so sparingly, with polite
acknowledgement that they are inferior companions to the people
around us. We should extend this courtesy to our children, too; I try
to apologize to my young kids any time I use my phone in front of
them, trying to convey not only that what I’m doing is a bit rude,
but also that it is unquestionably far less important than them.
Some
simple, supporting guidelines: Phones should never appear at a meal
or on a bar. Never in a meeting. And never in the bedrooms of our
children, who deserve at least one place in the world where they can
enjoy our undivided attention.
Alcohol
norms remind us that it’s often undesirable to be drunk. Phone
norms should remind us that it’s often undesirable to be
distracted. Put differently, the cost of alcohol can be measured in
lost sobriety; the cost of phones can be measured in lost attention.
Rule
No. 2: Put away our phones.
Whether
composing an e-mail, solving a thorny problem or following a rich
story or argument, we often need all the attention we can muster.
Adrian Ward, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin,
echoes the findings of the Oxford study, writing that our phones
exact a “brain drain” just by virtue of being in the room.
In
a study he led, subjects turned off their phones and placed them
either face down on their desk; in their bag (or pocket); or in
another room. They then took a series of tests focused on reading,
math and pattern recognition. The results were striking: Performance
was strongest with phones in the other room; it diminished with
phones in bags; and diminished further with phones on desks. “Your
conscious mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone, but that
process – the process of requiring yourself to not think about
something – uses up some of your limited cognitive resources,”
Dr. Ward writes. If you find this improbable, you’re not alone:
Nearly 90 per cent of subjects insisted phone location had no bearing
on their performance.
At
my previous company, a design studio, I instituted a boardroom phone
ban. It was wonderful: Interstitial moments came to life with
spontaneous conversation, and meetings themselves became more focused
and productive. But I’d have liked to ban phones from desks
altogether. Wouldn’t this be sensible? Our phones stand between us
and our best work. They are a physical barrier to the flow state,
that magical zone in which we are fully present, wholly absorbed by
the task at hand. (One can only imagine how much better this essay
would be if I’d followed my own rule, instead of keeping my phone
on my desk as I write.)
Phones
also mess with our capacity to learn and to read. Our phones keep us
in a state of what Dr. Turkle calls “hyperattention.” Constantly
grazing on bite-size snacks of information, we have lost our appetite
for a proper meal. This can make focusing on a lecture, or a book,
seem impossible; the pace can feel agonizingly slow.
Marshall
McLuhan writes, “A new medium is never an addition to an old one,
nor does it leave the old one in peace.” In the competition for our
attention, phones have an unfair advantage over the written or spoken
word. Keeping a phone nearby while reading a book is like putting a
plate of fries beside your salad.
Our
phones use our brains, then, even when our brains don’t want to use
our phones. So any time we want to really use our brains – to work,
to learn, to read – we should put our phones away. As such, our
phones should never join us for meetings, nor should they be on our
desks, at least not by default. They should never enter a classroom.
And they should never be near a book we’re reading. French fries
are delicious, but sometimes you need a salad.
Rule
No. 3: When paying attention to nothing at all, we should put away
our phones.
Nowadays,
we text in line at the supermarket. We listen to podcasts while we
wash the dishes. We scroll Instagram while we pee. Our phones join us
at the park, the dock and the hiking trail. They have robbed us of
the moments we could be free, letting our minds rest or wonder. And
the cost is enormous.
For
one, our phones deplete us, turning leisure into work. Incoming texts
demand a response; sharing photos means editing photos and writing
captions. As a result, our to-do list grows endlessly, and our actual
free time dwindles. Instagram might feel like the polar opposite of
productive labour, but, then, mindless scrolling is basically the
engine of the modern economy. (According to one estimate, Facebook
makes about a penny for every user each minute.) So many apps are
built to invoke rage, envy, lust, compulsion. It’s not exactly the
ideal postwork – or pre-bed – wind-down. (Keeping my phone
plugged in, on the kitchen counter, feels like a way of protecting my
evenings and certainly my nights.)
More,
in phone-land, workwork is only a flick away. If we once celebrated
phones as liberators – we’re responding to e-mails, but we’re
poolside! – we now see the opposite is true: We’re poolside, and
we’re still responding to e-mails. It’s a radical perversion of
the early dream of capitalism – that productivity gains would free
up time “for the full development of the individual,” per Karl
Marx.
Instead,
as Jenny Odell writes, we “find every last minute captured,
optimized or appropriated as a financial resource.” Our phones are
why we feel busier than ever; they annihilate free time, leaving us
stretched, stressed and exhausted.
With
no time for nothing, we may also deprive ourselves of our best ideas.
Ludwig Wittgenstein celebrated the bed, the bath and the bus as the
most fertile venues for great ideas. Mindlessly lathering our hair or
staring out the window, our prefrontal cortex relaxes and deep
insights reveal themselves. Mozart and Einstein, among others, made
space for nothing on long, solitary walks. (Had Einstein been into
Serial, we might not have modern-day theoretical physics.) Our
phones, however, make solitude elusive; by stealing our attention,
they rob us of the space to sit with our thoughts; to process
experiences and memories; to build a stable sense of self. It’s a
cruel paradox: Our phones promise endless connection. Instead, they
take solitude – what the philosopher Paul Tillich calls “the
glory of being alone” – and leave us with loneliness – “the
pain of being alone.”
An
attention economy assigns no value to paying attention to nothing.
But after drinking all day from the firehose of the internet, we need
to protect space for nothing – space for reprieve, for digestion,
for day-dreaming. The opportunities to do so are endless: Any moment
in which we are doing nothing, we should try actually doing nothing.
And when visiting places with great regenerative power – anywhere
in nature, for one – we should ditch our phones, too. Of course,
our phones should never enter our bedrooms. (With luck, the
alarm clock industry is on the cusp of a boomtime.) And ambitious
though it may be, perhaps we can even try to go to the bathroom all
by ourselves.
A
cultural shift, of sorts, may already be under way. But we need to go
beyond popular arguments, per the documentary The Social Dilemma,
which focuses on the evils of push notifications and social-media
algorithms. “The ‘content’ of a medium,” Prof. McLuhan
writes, “is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to
distract the watchdog of the mind.” The culprit, in other words, is
the hardware, not the software. In the war against weapons of mass
distraction, our best hope is to avoid the battlefield altogether. So
in those moments we deem worthy of our attention, we must create
physical distance between ourselves and our phones.
It
won’t be easy. It’s been nearly 500 years since Blaise Pascal
declared, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability
to sit quietly in a room alone.” Humans have been beating back a
sense of dread since time immemorial. Leave it to the evil genius of
capitalism – supercharged by technology and motivational psychology
– to devise the perfect antidote to the human condition: a portable
distraction machine to shield us from the threat of boredom,
uncertainty or loneliness. It’s no wonder we’re hooked, nor that
we’ve become a society of enablers, overlooking one another’s
degeneracy in exchange for permission to indulge ourselves.
It’s
time for an intervention. Withdrawal symptoms, I can assure you, are
light. For, we all know that phone-free days – whether it’s a
weekly digital sabbath or an annual vacation – are the most
glorious days. When I harangue my dinner companions to ditch their
phones, they call me a crank but then happily oblige (usually). Deep
down, we all want to ditch our phones, because we know that when we
do, we clear the path to achieve our most vital aspirations: to build
loving relationships. To realize our creative and intellectual
potential. To find peace.
As
the pandemic ebbs and real life returns, let’s infuse the new
normal with new norms. Let’s agree on a baseline for healthy,
appropriate phone use. Even if we fall short, at least we’ll be
able to identify the gap between achievement and aspiration. As we
gaze across that gap, I hope we’ll see neither discomfort nor
dread, but rather the bright, shining light of our own humanity. And
I hope we’ll bask in that light as we work together on the project
of our lifetimes, to learn truly who we are.
The
pandemic has underscored the immeasurable benefits of face time over
FaceTime. Making eye contact, resting a hand on a shoulder, we can
connect most strongly, diving deep and achieving catharsis. Yet too
often, even when we’re together, our phones are still with us.
