Hi, my name is Anna and I’m an addict. Truthfully, I think I have been since the age of 16, but these past months of increased isolation and self-reflection allowed me to finally admit it to myself. I’m not addicted to the classic hits of alcohol and drugs that we were instructed on how to “Just Say No” to in awkward middle school health classes. My drug of choice is one that I can use all day, every day, without drawing any attention for concern from friends or family. This substance draws me in with the lure of dopamine-fueled rushes, but it always leaves me wanting more. No matter how many hours I spend using, I can never fully reach the high that will satisfy my cravings. Ladies and gentlemen, I am addicted to my iPhone.
In finally admitting to myself that I’m a slave to my iPhone, I began to observe just how dependent I am to the small rectangle that everyone and their grandmas seem to be infatuated with. Way too often I catch myself unconsciously grabbing my phone “just to check it” for no real reason. I mean, even if I just checked it ten minutes ago, I will still feel a strong urge to grab it and cycle through the merry-go-round of social media apps to look and see if there’s any world news or notifications that require my immediate attention. This compulsion to scroll is a major part of the addiction that many people choose to ignore because of how ingrained their phones are within their daily lives. Smartphones can be extremely useful and fun to use, but we have to ask ourselves, am I using my phone, or is my phone using me? Besides the practical applications of smartphones, the constant flow of likes from addictive social media apps work to attract our attention and overstimulate our brains whilst simultaneously numbing us to our real-world surroundings. Over the summer I’d catch myself scrolling on TikTok for HOURS at a time without even realizing what I was doing. Once either my phone would die or it was time to do one of the basic human functions of eating, sleeping or going to the bathroom, I’d finally come up and out of the comatose state and then wonder how and why I just mindlessly scrolled for that long.
Another aspect of addiction is a physical and mental dependency to the substance, causing you to desperately seek out the drug in a constant attempt to get your “high” back. I’ve begun to take note of how my phone seems to be glued to me, as if it’s an additional limb on my body. Moving from the bedroom to the kitchen? Gotta grab my phone. Going into the living room? Gotta grab my phone. Getting out of the car to pump gas? Gotta grab my phone. No!! I don’t want my life to be a constant effort of clutching onto my inanimate iPhone as if it’s my lifeline. If I went through and responded to the notifications fifteen minutes ago, then I can surely go outside or spend quality time with friends without the incessant distraction of a smartphone. Catching myself excessively clutching onto my phone leads me to question how we as a society gauge our relationships with our phones. How often do we use them as figurative pacifiers for the present moment? I’ve often heard the complaints from people seeing parents hand off an iPad to a wailing kid in the grocery store and how it’s “bad parenting,” but whenever you experience a dull or awkward moment in life, do you immediately use your phone to “escape”? And if you do, how different are you from that parent lazily trying to distract that child with technology?
Smartphones are invaluable to the lives of modern humans, allowing us to communicate with and navigate the world on a global scale. But along with the power of owning a handheld supercomputer comes a tendency to overly depend upon the machines that are meant to strengthen our abilities, rather than dampen them. In the realization of my abusive relationship with my iPhone, I’ve learned to catch myself in the act of abusing the drug of my iPhone, and I intend to recover from this addiction and redefine the way in which I spend my time with my phone so that I don’t spend the majority of my life staring at a screen.
