Put the phone down

I realised something terrifying the other day - I can hardly remember what I've done for much of the last five years - and it's almost entirely because of my phone.

If you asked me, last week, what I had done the preceding Tuesday, or any other day for that matter - I would be pretty damned stumped for a minute or so while I tried to remember. Usually I resort to taking my phone out and looking at the calendar to see what I should have been doing.

Ah yes. We went to the beach on Wednesday morning and the library on Friday.

I thought it was because I just had a terrible memory, that is until I chose to spend a couple of days without my phone.

I'd been intending to reduce my social media consumption anyway, so just out of choice I decided to leave it switched off in the car when we got to the supermarket or the park. Now all of a sudden I can remember all of these intricate little details as if it was just five minutes ago. The difference was enlightening and terrifying in equal measure, because it showed me how little attention I'd been paying to my day to day activities, including the time I'd been spending with my children.

Attention is the new gold

There's a commodity that has become one of the most valuable assets in the world over the last ten years or so that didn't even exist before the year 2000. Now it rakes in tens of billions of dollars a month for a multitude of enormous internet-based conglomerates, and it's gradually crippling our ability to focus and process any meaningful or long-term information.

It's your attention.

Social media platforms and their affiliated companies don't care how much money you pay them any more. The game has changed entirely. They've got a taste for new blood, something far more lucrative, and far more damaging.

All they want is to command your attention for as long as possible.

It doesn't matter to them if you buy anything, subscribe to their content or donate to their 'worthy cause', their new mission is just to keep you locked in, scrolling and clicking, disengaged from the real world and living in a non-existent fantasy land of advertisement and hollow hedonism. All the time you're looking  at your phone, scrolling through their material, reading their click-bait headlines and frowning at their deliberately inflammatory comments and suggestions,  they own you and your time.

Why do they want this?

Because we as the users of social media are no longer the customers, we're the product. The new customers are the advertising companies, bidding for chunks of our attention as we willingly donate our precious time to a variety of enormous, faceless corporations who rake in billions as we pour our lives down the drain.

It's really rather evil

It's all planned, and it's so much worse than you think.

The notification icon on Facebook is a little red circle with a white number in it because that colour combination was found, through lots of experimenting, to be the most enticing little icon, which people were more likely to click on compulsively than any other colour or shape combination.

It only takes a quick glance at any baby or toddler to realise that our brains love visual feedback, and bright lights. We smile and 'aww' condescendingly when our little ones figure out that pushing the button on their toy makes it flash multicoloured lights, before we then pull out our own little slab of bright flashy lights and start tapping away.

Both of us are getting an addictive dopamine hit, but one of them is very very dangerous.

Webpages and apps used to have seperate pages to click through, until it was discovered that by making a single page with 'infinite scroll' you could keep people engaged for far longer. Infinite scroll tells the user there's something else just further down the page that they might miss out on, so the temptation to just drag it into view is so much stronger than the desire to tap an icon through to a seperate webpage.

So now Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok all employ infinite scroll, to keep you scrolling for hours rather than thinking.

If you don't believe me, then watch the social dilemma on Netflix. Don't be surprised if you then immediately uninstall Instagram and pour yourself a very generous glass of wine.

But I keep my phone on silent

Of course having your phone on loud, buzzing away on the table all the time is clearly a very obvious distraction from life, so many people (myself included) opt to keep it on silent, tucked away in a pocket, just for when I need it.

It seems innocuous enough, and you think you're not giving it any attention, but it's terrifying how pervasive these devices are. The sensation of the phone resting against your leg in your pocket is a constant subconscious reminder to your brain of its presence, and even if you don't think you are, you're always thinking about pulling it out and searching for that little dopamine hit, even if only subconsciously.

Almost every phone now has a built in pedometer to count your steps. This is peddled as a 'health benefit', making being healthy 'cool' and encouraging you to move more, but in reality it's just another sneaky way to get you to keep your phone on your person at all times.

If you've got it with you, you're more likely to play with it.

What effect is it having on my kids?

The reason I couldn't remember a damn thing for such a vast period of my life is because I wasn't paying proper attention. Every five minutes I was directing my gaze down to whatever inconsequential notification had dinged through to my phone, usually just to dismiss it, but even the act of checking caused me to disengage from reality long enough that I then failed to process the current moment enough to form meaningful memories. I dread to think of the impact this was having on my relationship with my children.

Every so often one of my kids will look at me while I'm using my phone. I try to explain what I'm doing (I'm just looking up the directions, or I'm checking the weather) but of course there are times when I'm mindlessly scrolling through rubbish. Clearly it teaches them that it's the thing that we adults like to do - to disengage from the real world and douse our brains in pretty lights - and even worse - that it's more interesting than spending time with them.

So of course they will then want their own phone and proceed to spend hours of their own time doing precisely the same thing.

Monkey see, monkey do...

I've also caught myself getting stressed and irritated when I'm trying to do something on my phone and my kids interrupt what I'm doing. But the fact is that almost 100% of the time whatever it is I'm doing can wait - the kids are  far more important, and need me now - and all the time I'm spending online is time I will never get back with them during their rapidly changing childhood.

So what do I do now?

When I come home from work, I leave my phone in the car until they've gone to bed.

During the day when I'm at home, it lives on the microwave until we go out. I allow myself half an hour of 'phone time' in the evening after they've gone to bed to decompress, before we then set about cleaning up yet another day's chaos and mess.

When I started doing this I would feel jittery and uncomfortable, and the temptation to go and get it, particularly when going to the loo, 'just to check' was terrifying - it genuinely was an addiction.

Quite quickly, however, after a few days the urge began to wear off and I stopped noticing that I didn't have my phone in my pocket. Even to the point where I left the house a few times without it. It's scary how wrong that now feels, especially given I'm a member of the last generation who would quite happily go out before mobile phones existed and not worry about needing to be in contact with everyone at all times.

I also started putting my watch back on. I realised that a lot of the time I was getting my phone out of my pocket just to check the time, but then I'd get distracted because I'd notice a new notification and proceed to spend a few seconds checking it out. By wearing my watch again I'm not needing to get my phone out and I'm not breaking my attention on the task at hand.

It is also a stark reminder to myself about how careful I have to be with introducing the kids to phones and the internet. As with anything, they are tools than can be used for enormous good, if harnessed correctly. But it's us parents against them, the enormous corporations bidding for our children's attention, and it's not going to be an easy battle.

This is so much better

It has revolutionised my parenting. I'm present, engaged and far more happy. I'm not sat there waiting for time to pass like I was before, because I'm genuinely involved with what the kids are up to and I'm losing track of time like I used to when I was a child myself.

It's glorious and I wish I'd done it sooner.