Smartphones let us replace undesirable thoughts and feelings. For the first time in human history, we can think/feel something and just reject it. This capability used to be reserved for addicts whose emotional realities were so horrible they’d ruin their lives to not experience them.
Now, even the mild boredom of waiting in line at the supermarket is worth replacing with distraction, fear, anger, lust and entertainment from online media. The replacement feelings fit into the machinery, but wear out quickly.
Overshadowing inconvenient thoughts and feelings requires something deeper down the brain stem. So we consume political outrage, fast-paced entertainment and ever-weirder videos.
This creates an illusion of control: Whatever thought/feeling/sensation arises, we don’t have to experience because the smartphone produces alternatives. But the experiences we replace don’t disappear. They always return. And when they do, they find us as a different person. A person who taught themselves they can’t deal with that experience.
The illusion of control works until the next time the experience arises — and it always does. But then we reach for the same stuff that let us avoid it before.
We’re collectively rejecting our thoughts and feelings. And you can see the results in every mental health statistic.
What’s the alternative?
“It’s over when you stop wanting it to be over” is one of the most impactful things a therapist ever told me. It arose when I was dealing with the same issue for the nth time and hated his response. Just give me the 3 tricks to stop the pattern. Tell me the 7 steps.
Doesn’t work that way. It’s like jumping off the dive board as a kid. You look down at the water with sweaty palms and your friends cheering your name. You stare at the water, thinking it may as well be concrete.
No amount of standing at the dive board takes the fear away. The magical moment where you’re not afraid won’t come. You need to jump while afraid. Then the next time is easier and the third time might even be exciting.
The fear only goes away when you’re okay with it anyway. It’s over when you stop wanting it to be over.
I like Oliver Burkeman’s quote: “Reality doesn’t need you to control it.” I think we can extend it to: “Your mind doesn’t need you to control it.”
This notion still scares me. If I don’t control my mind, how long until I’m an obese, unemployed drug addict?
It’s more subtle than that. Ceasing control doesn’t mean succumbing to every impulse. We tend to feel the impulse creep up, deem it unacceptable and reject it. But this springs from an assumption that we can’t deal with it. That if we were to accept the impulse is there, it’d overpower us.
I’m just talking about ceasing control of the impulse. To let impulse be there and not act on it. Because once you stop resisting it, it softens. It’s the same paradox: Once you’re perfectly okay having the desire without relieving it, you can actually stop.
But it requires giving up control.
Our smartphones (and many other things in modernity) offer us the illusion of permanent control. But the same paradox that applies to our emotions also applies to reality: Only when we stop insisting reality transform at our command do we have the power to change it.
Again, I instinctively resist this notion. It feels like I’m lowering my sights, losing my ambition. But it’s precisely the opposite.
Once you admit there’s a difference between what you control and what you don’t, you realize how much is under your control and exercise it.
Only when you no longer need the control do you get it.