4 ms·

I'm in the same boat as you. One thing I've learned over the last few years is that the problem with "phone addition" has more to do with the lack of boredom t

I'm in the same boat as you. One thing I've learned over the last few years is that the problem with "phone addition" has more to do with the lack of boredom than any physical effects. The really short version is that there's some science that suggests that periods of boredom increase creativity. By constantly keeping active with your phone, we're losing this "boredom time". Personally, I've made a habit of occasionally just doing nothing every now and then. Put the phone away; don't listen to anything. It's actually great for my commute home (I take a bus). I can just sit/stand and not do anything and just relax for a few minutes on the way home. Personally, I think the biggest problem here isn't that kids are spending a lot of time looking at their screens. It's that parents _aren't_ spending a lot of time engaging with their kids about the content. When a screen is used to distract a child - or anyone,really - instead of engage them, that's where the problem arises.

rleigh 8y ago
I often wonder how much creativity, thought and self-reflection is missed out on because the response to boredom or quiet moments is to reach for the phone, rather than engaging the brain and being alone with one's thoughts for a time. Not only personal time, but work time as well. How many of us see work colleagues on their phones or random websites during work time? If that moment of boredom had been spent thinking about new products, the details of a customer problem, or something else work-related, that could have produced something tangible, rather than being wasted. When "slack time" is automatically used for indulging in phone apps or web surfing, that's displacing activity which pre-phone-apps and pre-internet, would be much more likely to have involved alternative productive activity, from future planning to work-related talk with co-workers, to designing and prototyping experimental stuff. Now it's self-indulgent skinner boxes compelling us to fairly fruitless time wasting. Some people are so focussed on this stuff that it takes priority over actual face to face conversations, which I personally find intensely rude, and I don't think I'm wrong in saying this is going to directly affect the productivity and effectiveness of them as an individual and the team as a whole. Their focus isn't on the company's business, but on themselves. I don't find this degree of self-absorption healthy; it's like working with zombies. In some ways, I preferred my original programming job where we only had a shelf full of books and dial-up internet, and you actually worked with your co-workers, talked to your customers on the phone, rather than merely existing in the same space while their minds are somewhere else. Not that I'm a Luddite, it's the social changes I abhor, not the technical. It's weird, and worrying, just how addicted people have become at the expense of real life in the here and now, and a pushback against it is long overdue.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  There's also a chance that the distraction is dissipating energy spent in particularly unhelpful endeavors. If that's true, who knows what the ratio between helpful and unhelpful boredom is?

rleigh 8y ago

I often wonder how much creativity, thought and self-reflection is missed out on because the response to boredom or quiet moments is to reach for the phone, rather than engaging the brain and being alone with one's thoughts for a time. Not only personal time, but work time as well. How many of us see work colleagues on their phones or random websites during work time? If that moment of boredom had been spent thinking about new products, the details of a customer problem, or something else work-related, that could have produced something tangible, rather than being wasted. When "slack time" is automatically used for indulging in phone apps or web surfing, that's displacing activity which pre-phone-apps and pre-internet, would be much more likely to have involved alternative productive activity, from future planning to work-related talk with co-workers, to designing and prototyping experimental stuff. Now it's self-indulgent skinner boxes compelling us to fairly fruitless time wasting. Some people are so focussed on this stuff that it takes priority over actual face to face conversations, which I personally find intensely rude, and I don't think I'm wrong in saying this is going to directly affect the productivity and effectiveness of them as an individual and the team as a whole. Their focus isn't on the company's business, but on themselves. I don't find this degree of self-absorption healthy; it's like working with zombies. In some ways, I preferred my original programming job where we only had a shelf full of books and dial-up internet, and you actually worked with your co-workers, talked to your customers on the phone, rather than merely existing in the same space while their minds are somewhere else. Not that I'm a Luddite, it's the social changes I abhor, not the technical. It's weird, and worrying, just how addicted people have become at the expense of real life in the here and now, and a pushback against it is long overdue.

dwighttk 8y ago
There's also a chance that the distraction is dissipating energy spent in particularly unhelpful endeavors. If that's true, who knows what the ratio between helpful and unhelpful boredom is?