Digital addiction: Focusing on the cure, not the disease

Digital addictions are similar to pathologies of food, and unlike other things we usually think of as addictive, like hard drugs. That is because, as with food, most of us cannot escape the digital. Everyday, we are exposed to the thing that also incites pathological behavior. It&#x27;s impossible to go cold turkey. People with food pathologies resort to things like time-bounding exercises (if it&#x27;s noon, I can eat). Like processed food, digital experiences are backed by an industry whose profits are pegged to how much of us they consume. People with digital addiction are suffering from a kind of informational metabolic syndrome.<p>The cure is harder than the author thinks. &quot;Making our lives so warm that the digital is dull in comparison&quot; sounds great, but our phones channel all the vices, titillations, and novelties of the world. It&#x27;s actually hard to make that dull.<p>I&#x27;m not sure there is a cure, but a good approach would be a digital purge -- take a month off if you possibly can. That will serve as a dopamine reset, and make many things IRL <i>seem</i> more interesting.<p>Buy a device that limits what you can do, like a lightphone.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelightphone.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelightphone.com</a><p>Barring a light phone, various parental controls...<p>Because if you let the digital channel duke it out with the analog without rigging the game, the digital will keep sucking you back in.

In the spirit of anything that helps should be considered:<p>Disable all notifications except for direct messaging from family&#x2F;friends, banking and other important stuff. Everything else cannot possibly be urgent, see next point.<p>Do social networking&#x2F;news from a desktop only. 30 mins per day, 3 times per week, once a week, doesn&#x27;t matter. This beats being exposed all day every day.<p>When in your home, get used to putting the phone in the next room for a while. This is perhaps the simplest but most powerful tip. You&#x27;re (re)learning that you do not need this device to feel whole.<p>Don&#x27;t bring your phone into the toilet, no matter how enjoyable these &quot;peaceful&quot; sessions are.<p>Get used to &quot;missing&quot; things. Your morning routine of taking a full hour to catch up, reduce it to 5 mins. Just scan news headlines.<p>For your so-called &quot;hobby&#x2F;work&quot; interests, stop following experts on social media. Instead, subscribe to weekly newsletters in your field, and set apart some time per week to read them. Massive time-saver plus you don&#x27;t have to get annoyed with all the noise of their personal lives and political views. I can assure you that you won&#x27;t miss anything noteworthy. If it&#x27;s important, it&#x27;s in the newsletter.<p>When in public or generally just waiting for something, try out this thing we used to call boredom. Just watch the world. The environment. It&#x27;s people. Or just the wall. It&#x27;s refreshing. And don&#x27;t put on headphones.<p>Don&#x27;t expect perfection. Have 10 time wasters? Reduce to 5.<p>Fill in your new non-digital time at first with low ambition activities. Do a chore. Walk the dog, or yourself. Even the act of watching a movie uninterrupted is an improvement. But be sure to fill the void with something, otherwise you&#x27;ll fall back. The next step up is group activities and shared obligations.<p>And if you&#x27;re really ready to slash it, try brutal rationality. For every digital activity, track usage, review it and write down what tangible positives it brings into your life. Do this with an accountant hat on, sans emotion.<p>Good luck!

I spent a few months reducing the effect of addictive technology: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nicolasbouliane.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;silence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nicolasbouliane.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;silence</a> . Fewer triggers make such an addiction more manageable.<p>It works, but only as long as I can fill the void with meaningful activities. There are days when I have nothing to do, or I am too tired to do anything.<p>People who quit weed reported the same problem. If you use a quick fix for boredom for a long time, replacing it means finding other ways to deal with boredom.

&gt; The solvents we need in this case are the healthier methods of fulfilling these longings.<p>Terrible take. Algorithmic feeds and ad-tech has continually optimized how to get and maintain our attention. It is ridiculous to think &quot;going into nature&quot; or any individual solution is the answer. We blame pharmaceutical companies for making addictive drugs, why don&#x27;t we blame tech companies for making addictive apps?

Focus on not falling for the same playbook used in big tobacco and big food:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC2879177&#x2F;#sec-2title" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC2879177&#x2F;#sec-2t...</a>

Digital entertainment has already replaced the healthy lifestyle the author recommends. Things like exercise and socializing help, but they&#x27;re not sufficient to completely prevent excessive use in my experience. Something else is needed; I&#x27;ve had some luck using commitment devices and trying to make the option less accessible to myself. But I think we need cultural solutions, not personal ones.

It&#x27;s interesting that the only jurisdiction doing any thing about this is China, and they mostly only target online games.<p>Games where young frustrated [0] [1] Chinese teenagers could talk relatively freely with others from different regions of China. Or god forbid, learn English and have contacts with westerners. Better to keep them grinding on shaving a few tenth of a second on basic algebra problems for the Gaokao. That will better prepare them for the factories.<p>At the same time, of course, China pushes CCP-backed TikTok to American Teens (gathering huge amount of intelligence and data in the process).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2018&#x2F;world&#x2F;too-many-men&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2018&#x2F;world&#x2F;too-many-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;05&#x2F;gender-imbalance-china-one-child-law-backfired-men-336435.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;05&#x2F;gender-imbalance-china-o...</a>

The only instances where &quot;digital addiction&quot; is treated serious are authoritarian countries like China. In non-politically motivated indices it does not exist. Because it does not exist. No more than printed newspapers ruined people in the 1800s, electricity in the 1900s, radio in the 1920s or TV in the 1950s. This is basically just repurposing of future shock scares by scammers running &quot;treatment&quot; programs in the west and governments using it for social control elsewhere.

I am extremely militantly atheist, but I remember growing up with the church and experiencing community. There were weekly potlucks and all the church kids would hang out frequently while the parents drank. There were various clubs like choir you could just show up and be accepted.<p>Today we see things like christian parents abandoning their gay children, wanting to &quot;cure&quot; trans people, or &quot;christians&quot; voting for trump and it&#x27;s clear that religion and therefore, for many, community has been corrupted by politics. From the outside religion seems more about hate than love. An irony considering the teachings of Jesus.<p>The internet exposes people to other people all around the earth who grew up in different environments, it makes clear that religion is a tradition, not a truth to be measured and understood, it is clear that region is in decline.<p>The tragedy is that what was once a centerpiece of community has dwindled, and I think we are seeing the effects across society. Lack of community promotes addiction.<p>We used to be born into community and baptized into it, but now we are left seeking it ourselves without guides like pastors. Community has been replaced with therapy. What we were once born into is now something we have to work for and pay for, and I don&#x27;t think that as a society we have figured out what the next evolution of community looks like.

Digital addiction is real. Some decades ago, when people didn&#x27;t have personal audio players and youtube it was normal for people to sing in the street. Now just look what a pitiful society of consumers we have become. We are giving up our identities for more digital crack.