Why Is It So Hard to Stop Looking at My Phone?

Brett McCracken: It is so hard to not look at your phone at every opportunity. And I struggle with this, and I’m someone who thinks about these topics a lot, has written books about the dangers of this. I still struggle like when I’m at a stoplight and there’s 10 seconds of downtime at a red light, I struggle to not reach for my phone and just do something, anything, no, no real reason to be on my phone. But we are now conditioned, right? There’s this almost like Pavlovian impulse to grab for our phone at every opportunity. Now, why is that? Why do we struggle with this? And I think probably most people watching this video can relate to that feeling. I think there’s two things that are playing into this. One is just the the economic structure of digital life and the profit motive at work here. There is every incentive for these social media companies, for these smartphone companies, to make it as addictive as possible, right? There’s more money that they’re earning. The more we are hooked, the more we can’t turn away, the more we can’t withhold our hand from reaching for the phone at every opportunity. So they have every incentive to have this be the case, and so they actually hired behavioral psychologists many of these social media companies to to kind of create interfaces and like reward dopamine hit kind of dings and lights and all the things that like, people who built casinos thought about people who built slot machines, thought about those same people were hired by Facebook and social media companies to think about, how can we dial this in so well that it’s just impossible to resist, and there’s these kind of dopamine hit reinforcement structures that keep people coming back for another hit, for another hit. So that’s one reason why we’re struggling to resist the phone. The other thing is simply our human nature. I think that we are fallen creatures who we resist kind of the enticements, right? Just like you think about the imagery and proverbs of you know, Proverbs is often saying things like, stay on the road of wisdom and don’t listen to Lady folly, who’s like sitting over here on the doorstep calling out to you, trying to get you to, like, step off the path of righteousness. So much of our flesh is prone to distraction, right? We are prone to wander. Lord, I feel it. That is what sin is. It’s distractibility. It’s knowing the right thing. But like going off track towards lady folly and her temptations, the algorithms are the lady folly of our day, right? The things that you open your phone and see are the enticements shouting like, Hey, I know you might be doing something good and intentional, but like, come on. You can spare a few minutes to watch my video on YouTube or listen to this podcast or whatever. And so our I think our flesh is just wired to this kind of addictive behavior of distractibility and filling our lives with just constant amusement and trivial kind of pursuits that’s just in our flesh. So those are two things that I would say, and then maybe a third thing would be a perversion of a good impulse, which is productivity. So I think that the desire to make good use of your time is a biblical idea, right? The days are short. We need to make good use of our time. And I think a lot of Christians look at technology as a great benefit to that, because now we can be more optimized, and we can use our phone to, like, check emails when we’re like, walking from point A to point B, and we can use our devices literally all day beyond work hours to get things done. We can be more productive. But even that, I would say, is taking a good impulse but perverting it, because it’s not good if we get to a place where we cannot not grab for our phone in those one minute two minute three minute gaps in our day. It’s actually good for our souls to be able to go without anything and just be silent and still, to be present with God, to be present in his world. If you’re outside, it’s good to be able to not have mediated time in our lives. So even if you’re productive in that time, sometimes it’s not helpful for you spiritually to be hyper productive all the time.