Home of the Phone Free Commute
The Phone Dad Moment
I am a TV producer and father living in Surbiton, near London.
A few years ago, I spent my daughter’s entire ballet recital staring at my phone instead of watching her perform. I was in clear view of everyone, and it made her cry.
She has forgiven me. I haven’t forgiven myself.
I tried for years to cut my phone use. Nothing worked. Because of my job, I couldn’t just get a dumbphone.
I needed a way to own a phone without it owning me.
High Vis Idiot
Eventually I started meditating, mostly to try to loosen the phone’s grip.
It helped - for a while, I found I could simply say no to picking it up.
Then, on an ordinary drive back from an errand, I had a spiritual awakening, of sorts.
Annoyingly, it did not fix my phone use. But it did teach me a lot about the mind.
So I went nuclear to fix my phone problem once and for all.
I now wear a professional blue high-vis vest at the station that announces: Phone Free Commute.
High Vis Idiot, public accountability.
And mostly, it works. I get two hours a day of real mental silence - mental rest my brain badly needed.
The 9.17 To Somewhere Else
As I get further into this, what started as a desperate fix has turned into a genuine curiosity.
I’m fascinated by Buddhist philosophy, and I want to understand the trillion-dollar distraction machine through that lens.
Why does this little rectangle have such a hold on us?
My life is a jumble of work and family commitments, and the phone sits at the very centre of it. I want to map the parent/phone/work mind in all its messy complexity.
This Substack is my gonzo report from the front lines of the war for our attention.
P.S. All the posts and archive are entirely free.
