This article is from the spring 2025 edition of Coast Life magazine.
How did your detox January go? Mine not so good. I didn’t make it even through Day 1 without a relapse. It is so hard. Just a tiny, innocent-seeming slip ambushes you, and there you are, having to re-start. My only comfort is thinking that over the course of the month, my average did improve slightly. At least the exercise brought home to me how bad the addiction is. It sneaks up on you and sucks up your spare time and gets in the way of moving forward with your major life objectives, like tidying the carport. It’s too tempting to excuse it as being necessary to your work life. And social life, if you still have any. And its harms are all the harder to recognize because absolutely everybody else is doing it and not seeing anything wrong with it, even the smartest people you know. Especially them.
But I really need to do better so I have decided to keep battling the monkey into spring.
It’s much harder than any previous habit I’ve tried to break, like drinking. Oh, sorry, did you think I was talking about alcohol? I quit that cold turkey 20 years ago and never looked back. Alcoholism was a piece of cake compared to smartphoneism.
I remember not so long ago reading some moralist tsk-tsking because they saw someone checking their phone while out on a dinner date. Nobody would even notice that now. It’s just expected that half the people in any given restaurant at any given time will be ignoring their company and gazing into their phones. Often all parties around the table. I even saw a TV news item the other day where the Minister of Health checked his phone while taking questions at a press briefing. In the before times if you saw somebody do that, you’d assume it was a call from the Prime Minister with intel that couldn’t wait, maybe that the minister’s fly was open. Now it’s a safe bet it was just a new micro video of lady pole vaulters, which the algorithm has determined to be of special interest to this particular subscriber.
Experts who apparently have been spending quality time studying how we fritter away our lives blame Covid for greatly accelerating our shift from living our lives in the three-dimensional world using all five senses to partaking the flat, anti-septic world of the smartphone and significantly losing our humanity as a result. Apparently the average number of phonechecks per day made by adult Americans increased from 52 per day in 2016 to 205 in 2024. I can feel it. There has definitely been a quantum shift in the last while, although the smartphone habit has been gaining momentum for a long time. As deep in the dim past as 1999 when those two Canadian nerds in Waterloo invented the smartphone, which they quaintly called a Blackberry, its use was already becoming so addictive among the executive and gangster classes it was nicknamed “The Crackberry.” We’ve come a long way since then. I used to leave my phone at home a lot of the time and never miss it. Now if I don’t feel it in its accustomed place next to my heart as I step out, it’s like I forgot to put on my pants.
What has happened to us?
In a way it seems like we had no choice. If I accidentally leave my phone on silent now and somebody tries to call, I am likely to get an irate message, as if I violated some sacred societal norm. And the number of regular life functions you can do—must do even—through your phone has increased exponentially. Between 2013 and 2023, time spent on non-voice activities rose from an average of 27.3% to 57.6% according the researchers. Dialling actual 10-digit voice-only calls is almost beside the point now. Why bother when two clicks on What’s App can get you live video of your globetrotting granddaughter addressing you from atop the Arc de Triomphe? And I am absolutely amazed how much time my life partner spends lying in bed streaming movies on her tiny phone screen. Wide screen TV, your day is done.
And have you tried to negotiate a ticket to the QE or a Canucks game without a cell phone lately? I’m not sure it is even possible. Certainly it is not possible to book your umpteenth Covid shot without a smartphone, or some equally smart device. Official Canada seems to have quietly made the decision cell phones are required by all who expect to enjoy the full privileges of citizenship. Emergency announcements like tsunami or wildfire warnings, or a mass murderer roving
your neighborhood, are exclusively made over cell phone.
If you’re a senior still clinging to your old dial phone, you
don’t officially exist.
All of these factors together have people around the world spending a daily average of four hours and 37 minutes on their phones, which works out to 70 days per year or twelve years over the course of a lifetime. So it may be that unlike kicking your booze habit, going cold turkey on your cell phone is no longer a realistic option. Still, cutting back on those micro videos of excavators tumbling down cliffs or ABBA aging 50 years in ten seconds could definitely free up a year or two.
