It's possible to argue that dispensing with the habit of carrying and using a music player is also a potential win. What's one of the reasons smartphones can be

It's possible to argue that dispensing with the habit of carrying and using a music player is also a potential win. What's one of the reasons smartphones can be a problem? That they distract and disconnect you from your environment and absorb you in something other than what's around you. Music players can also do that. If you turn the music off, it'll open your ears to the sounds of your environment. If you try it for an extended period of time, you may develop a greater attentiveness and auditory acuteness. Each of these devices, while not bad on its own and in itself, does provide an opportunity for the device to lay claim to one or more of our senses. The multiverse is a step further in that direction, a further bubble of engineered experience disconnected from reality and yes almost posing as reality. This does not bode well for the intellect as nothing in the intellect was not first in the senses. Our intuitions are at their best when seeded by the passive experience of the world, and if our experience is constantly flooded by media and engineered simulations often of a very unhealthy variety, then our alignment with reality will be off. This sort of passive perception of reality is at the heart of contemplation which is what true leisure (not recreation) is all about. To quote Josef Pieper[0], "the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul." [0] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/408300-happiness-and-contemplation https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/408300-happiness-and-c...