I met an extraordinary man this week. Simon is young, employed in a great job, a husband and a father of three. He’s never owned a mobile phone, he just never bought one.
We meet, shake hands, and I follow him around for a few hours. It is noticeably easy to be content in his company.
He is thoughtful, considerate, and gentle in his manner. He stops and looks me in the eye when I speak. Nothing is pulling his attention from the now.
Perhaps he would be exactly the same if he had the internet in his pocket. But it seems unlikely.
Faced with someone who has clearly decided to live on his own terms, the questions I came preloaded with start to seem foolish; how does he stay in touch with friends? How does he find his way around a new town? What about his kids?
As I ask him if it’s strange to see other people looking down at their phones all the time, I hear the echoes of the many inquisitors of my childhood.
My point of difference was that I stopped eating meat in junior infants. As a child, it meant a lot of questions from adults, mostly friends’ parents who had to figure out what to feed me when I’d land in after school. Despite 30 years of opportunity, I’ve never come up with a satisfying answer as to why I stopped, why my omnivore parents didn’t force me, and why I have never been tempted to just eat meat.
I never looked at meat as food, so it’s never been complicated for me. Simon doesn’t have a grand explanation for managing his personal technology deficit, because “it’s just not something I’ve ever had,” he says.
Even still, less than 20 years after the first smartphone was unveiled, Simon seems like a member of an uncontacted tribe. Unpunctured by the “modern-day hypodermic needle,” as Dr Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, has called it.
[ Saunas, cinemas and listening to albums: 25 ways to get off your phoneOpens in new window ]
Lembke, who is also the Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, suggests that although we are living in a period of plenty, so many of us are miserable because we cannot be alone with our own thoughts. We have come to believe that life should never be boring, that discomfort and pain are inherently bad. So we turn to our phones, or other drugs of choice, seeking stimulation and avoiding the banality of the everyday, and we get caught in a cycle of dopamine addiction.
“When we’re constantly bombarding our brains with digital stimuli, we change our hedonic, or ‘joy’ set point, such that we need more potent stimuli in larger quantities over time to get the same effect,” Lembke, who is also the Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, tells me over email. “When we’re not using, we’re experiencing the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive drug or behaviour, including anxiety, irritability, insomnia, depression, and craving.” The effect is pernicious, but over time, the addiction makes it hard to concentrate on difficult tasks, to be creative, even to care about one another.
Our human restlessness was studied a few years ago by psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard University. Hundreds of participants were tasked with sitting alone in a room for between six to 15 minutes with nothing to read, write, or do.
The fact that most participants found it difficult and boring wasn’t revelatory, but what shocked the researchers was that more than half of the participants chose to self-administer electric shocks of pain rather than sit and be alone with their thoughts for a few minutes. One man gave himself 190 electric shocks to pass the time. Regardless of their age, education, or income, it seemed people would rather experience something negative rather than do nothing at all.
I’m now halfway into my Free Four, my month-long elimination of all non-essential technology. I haven’t been on any social media, watched TV, or listened to any music or podcasts, other than what I hear in public places. As much as possible, I avoid the internet in general.
[ No Instagram, Netflix or YouTube: Can I survive a four-week digital detox?Opens in new window ]
Some benefits have been easy to appreciate. I’m going to bed earlier, sleeping better, and it doesn’t take 30 minutes of internal cajoling to get out of bed in the morning. I’ve been swimming laps a few times a week, and I played padel for the first time. I’m reading books at night instead of watching a screen, and even when I am on my laptop, I’m getting my work done more quickly.
Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
The internet does seem to “sabotage concentration”, as writer Kevin Barry said in a 2019 interview. Barry, who used to check his email hundreds of times a day, fluttering about from site to site, now turns off his devices at 7pm and doesn’t turn them back on again until he’s been at his writing desk for two or three hours the next day. “Even if nothing much is happening on the desk, I’ll sit there, I’ll wait it out. It’s part of the deal,” he said in the same interview.
The resilience to sit and endure even when things aren’t going well isn’t built in isolation. It’s built up in every tiny moment of the day that isn’t fragmented by a phone check.
The biggest change I’ve noticed is not that I am filling my time doing lots of new activities, but that often I am doing nothing. I can stand in a queue and just stand, I can wait for a friend and just wait, I can fall asleep in silence and just drift.
Being able to be idle, aspiring to it even, seems to go against our culture of personal optimisation and productivity.
But what’s the point in building tolerance for the pleasurable, painful, or predictable?
There are philosophical answers, and then there’s the real-world awakening of meeting Simon. Someone who is in control of giving another human and the present moment their full attention. Someone who appreciates time as the most valuable and finite resource any of us will ever have.
