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.
