Weren’t You?

“Put that phone down!”

It’s for your own good. One could even say it’s for your phone good but that doesn’t mean one should say that. But phone addiction is a real phenomenon.

Addiction, surprisingly, has a low bar, as far as meeting the definition.

To wit:

Addiction is characterized by inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional emotional response.
(via https://www.asam.org/resources/definition-of-addiction)

A low bar is hard in the limbo and it also ain’t good for being addiction to something.

And addiction is never good Captain Obvious. Never. Even if you are addicted to cereal with a ton of fiber.

Why?

See the definition above and know that by definition, addiction doesn’t come without "significant problems.”

Even if the problems result from something that started out as seemingly innocuous, like high-fiber cereal or…getting a cell phone.

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people and cell phones in and of themselves aren’t bad or evil or worthy of becoming a luddite but, again, addiction, ahem, ain’t good.

And people are addicted to their phones.

I see it in the classes when I teach; college students either itching to look at their phones or flat out looking at their phones while the world could burn down around them.

Now knowing that addiction requires the preposition “to” and that the noun to which one is addicted, matters, a lot, the thing that really frightens me about cell phone addiction is best expressed by Questlove Thompson:

"Dare I hesitate to say that creativity might be in jeopardy because one of the key components of being creative is boredom and silence and isolation."
(via https://www.npr.org/2018/05/01/600852801/questlove-aims-to-save-your-brain-creativity-might-be-in-jeopardy)

Cell Phone = no boredom, no silence, and no isolation.

You do the math.

Just don’t use your phone to do the math because we both know that will turn into the fall down the rabbit hole of checking your apps and tweeting and instagramming and pokemoning and tweeting about pokemining and the next thing you know it’s time for bed and your brain won’t shut off because of all the blue light and there is after all a new Netflix show you can stream till 6am upon which you will enter tomorrow zombie-like and…

You see? How it dominoes?

And all those dominoes falling could be the
[record scratch]
death
[woman screams]
of
[audience gasps into hot, very hot, condenser mic]
creativity.

And what do you think led to the cell phone that will be the death of creativity?

You guessed it: boredom, silence, and isolation.

I think we’re in the upside down Toto. [mixed reference = grade of A+]

So set a weekly schedule, set a daily timer, make it a reward, moderate usage via an app, but remember that the will needs practice and…

PUT THAT PHONE DOWN!

We need you to put that phone down. You were meant for bigger things than snapchat.

Weren’t you?



via GIPHY