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Indistractable
How Morality, Technology, and a Vocation Can Help Us Disconnect
Recent research shows that people want a digital detox. What solutions are available to us if we want to improve our relationship with our devices?
This piece is part of a week-long series on how to battle distraction, co-edited by Nir Eyal, the author of the new book Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
In The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s last novel before his death in 1982, the narrator imagines lying in bed trying to remember if he turned his car lights off. Eventually, he goes outside to check. The lights are off, but back in bed he imagines being caught in an eternal loop between the driveway and the bedroom, never really sure if the lights are on or off.
The passage can be read as a parable about self-control and the urge to check. In a recent survey conducted by the consulting company Deloitte involving 2,000 respondents, Americans were found to check their smartphones about 52 times a day. This growing impulse to reach for our phones reflects a deep cultural wound. Caught in a cycle of endlessly updating feeds, we are trapped in a perpetual state of checking.
So how do we heal?
For some, the trick might mean developing a whole new set of beliefs around self-control and moral responsibility.
Religious rituals are filled with tests of self-regulation such as fasting, meditation, sleep deprivation, long periods of prayer, and giving money to charity. These instances of self sacrifice are training you to do the right thing; they function like a wildfire burning the weeds to help the forest survive. Although they might seem unappealing or irrational from the perspective of the modern culture of self-maximizing, they exist within fully formed moral frameworks, designed to help their participants achieve self-control. These frameworks would be perfect for reigning in our digital habits, and perhaps their general decline is part of the problem.
Another way forward may involve adopting new tools. The popular app Forest has users plant a virtual…
