On teens drawn to a smartphone-free life:
For the first time, she experienced life in the city as a teenager without an iPhone. She borrowed novels from the library and read them alone in the park. She started admiring graffiti when she rode the subway, then fell in with some teens who taught her how to spray-paint in a freight train yard in Queens. And she began waking up without an alarm clock at 7 a.m., no longer falling asleep to the glow of her phone at midnight. Once, as she later wrote in a text titled the “Luddite Manifesto,” she fantasized about tossing her iPhone into the Gowanus Canal.
– ‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes, New York Times.
It’s true beyond doubt that our phones, particularly social media on those phones, have deprived us of experiencing the world around us, hour by hour, day to day.
Most of us feel a sense of existential malaise. It’s reality malnutrition, a deficiency of nourishment of the everyday.
But the answer to the ills of junk food is not to avoid eating altogether, it’s to switch to a healthy diet. Likewise, swapping our iPhones or Galaxys for a flip phone isn’t sustainable. We’re going to have to build a healthy relationship with information – and this is perhaps the most significant societal challenge of this decade.
Related: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.
This problem is not easy to fix, but it’s not impossible either. I’ve mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world.
When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built.
When you talk to someone who is smart but just seems so wrong, figure out what details seem important to them and why.
In your work, notice how that meeting actually wouldn’t have accomplished much if Sarah hadn’t pointed out that one thing.
As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.