A Digital Detox Won’t Work Unless You Ask Yourself This Question
Breaking free from your phone addiction starts with a simple thought experiment
There’s an app called Mute, which lets you set up challenges with your friends to see who can stay off their phone the longest. Another one called Moment offers “device addiction coaching” to help you pick up your phone less throughout the day. For $349, you can buy a Palm, a basic, credit card-sized phone designed to keep you from spending so much time on your big, distracting one (“Slip it into your yoga pants,” the website advertises). There are three-step programs, “offline” B&Bs, and even AA-like support groups all aiming to help you disconnect from your digital life. According to Google Trends, searches for “digital detox” have increased by 42% in the past year alone.
Clearly, we have a big appetite for a solution to this modern-day problem. And maybe some of these tools and services can help. But things like booking a phone-free weekend getaway or making our phones very tiny are Band-Aid fixes. For a more sustainable solution, we should ask ourselves this question: If we didn’t have our phones to stare at, what would we want to be doing instead?
A big part of the reason we find ourselves spending so much time on our phones is that we don’t have a…
