If We Know It's Bad for Us, Why Don't We Just Stop Being Addicted to Our Phones?

The role of mental health, life stressors, and habits in our digital distractions

Photo by Walls.io on Unsplash

At this point, I feel like virtually everyone under the age of 18 recognizes that they are on their phones too much. When I started teaching college full-time ten years ago, most students were addicted to their phones and seemed to be okay with that or even ignorant of their addiction. That isn’t the case anymore. Today my students know they’re on their phones too much and that it’s bad for them; they just don’t seem to be able to stop. A lot of us don’t seem to be able to stop. Which is remarkable, because we’re more convinced than ever that screens are sucking away our lives. Whether it’s Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, warning about the psychological dangers of social media and smartphones, or my friend

L. M. Sacasas

’s warning about the enclosure of our minds by technology, or reports on TikTok’s internal research, we know that social media and smartphones, when not used in moderation (the virtue of temperance), are harmful for us. They rob us of silence and the ability to contemplate. They have a tendency to prevent us from attending to reality, including our own thoughts and the people around us. They make us feel inadequate and insecure so we buy things. And so on.

And yet, and yet, here we are. Still scrolling endlessly, still addicted. Why is that? It seems to me that the standard argument for limiting or eliminating social media and smartphones fails to take into account the barriers many if not most people face. Specifically, I think that for many people, technology of distraction functions as a relatively safe coping mechanism that protects them from anxiety, depression, trauma, and general suffering. For other people, it’s less a matter of a diagnosable mental condition that they are avoiding than the normal stress of life. Life feels unmanageable and stressful, so they use technology of distraction to escape. Others may not be particularly stressed, but they have grown up using technology of distraction, and to abandon it, or even use it temperately would be extremely difficult.

It seems to me that if we want to have a conversation about people being addicted to their devices, we also need to have a conversation about why being addicted to a device was so attractive in the first place. Part of the answer was peer-pressure and mimetic desire, but I think for many people, technology of distraction serves a psychological function: it diverts us from emotions, thoughts, and experiences that overwhelm our system. For Pascal, diversions keep us from an awareness of ourselves, which would in turn lead us to God: