Mind The Gap: How The Phone Fills Every Pause
The phone pours into every chapter break in family life - to plug those gaps, try something radical.
You are making a cup of tea.
You flip on the kettle. While you wait, you check your phone. You refresh all the apps.
Then the kettle is boiled. You put down the phone again and move on with life.
Phones fill all the gaps in life. I’ve been thinking a lot about this during my commute (as you might imagine, I have quite a bit of time to think).
I have been in a strange mood, oddly like a tourist in a city I have lived in for two decades. I’ve been alternating my routes to see different parts of the underground.
At Embankment station they still have the old Mind The Gap announcement. It’s good they do because the gap between the train and the platform is massive. If I wasn’t off to work, I might sit for a bit and watch people step gingerly over the gap. But no, off to work.
HOW THE PHONE SHINES THROUGH THE GAPS IN LIFE
As soon as you get a smartphone, you want to use it all the time.
Not only do phones host a trillion dollar economy of AI-aided geniuses who battle to grab your attention, not only do they host all your relationships, they also rewire your brain so you feel a magnetic pull to whatever checking/fixing they offer.
Of course, people don’t use phones all the time. Life is in the way. There’s time with the family. There’s work. There’s leisure.
But the opportunity is in the gaps between these activities.
Over the years, I’ve become adept at working out which bits of life are gaps - and therefore I can get away with phone use - and which ones actually aren’t gaps, and phone use isn’t cool.
MARRIAGE
Let’s go back to the kettle boiling. But now, while I am waiting, let’s say my wife comes in and starts talking to me about something to do with feelings or something.
No longer a gap. This is one of those times to “be present”. I resist the pull, even as my mind is rent out of shape by the rectangular magnet. I do one of those nervy automatic refresh/quick put down motions on some app as she talks.
If we go for a meal together, obviously not a gap. But if she goes to the toilet - gap! When she comes back I put the phone away, but once that ball is rolling… Man, I want to look at my phone again. She’s talking about something that can be fact-checked by AI. We can skip this whole speculative conversation and just KNOW the answer if I could just get at the phone! But it won’t be cool to suggest it because this is quality time.
Soon she looks at her phone! It’s a brief check? Oo that’s definitely her Work Teams chat thing. Has this become a gap? Seconds pass. It is. Phew. We can both agree.
We sit at dinner and both check our phones.
FATHERHOOD
Let’s go back to the kettle boiling scenario again.
This time there’s a small child in the room, playing with a toy and chuntering away to themselves. You might say: model good behaviour, dad, this is not a gap.
But really… there’s A LOT of time to be spent with kids. They are around ALL the time. There are other occasions one can model good behaviour. The phone likely gets used here.
Unfortunately, small children have a gap-like quality about them. Despite all the hype, they aren’t THAT interesting. And their engagement with an adult near them is pretty sporadic - it’s not full-on eye contact like in the stock photos.
Fortunately with young children they don’t protest if you get it wrong.
But they grow. I used to look at my phone during my daughter’s ballet recitals. At six that was fine, at seven: she bursts into tears. Clearly what was previously a gap, now no longer a gap. You live and learn.
Children grow up and get a phone of their own. And they sit and use it for a while, problem solved - they’ve generously created a clear gap for everyone!
As they get older and then move out, my wife and I will become those people in their 70s for whom life is one long phone-filled gap.
WORK
Getting on with work can be difficult at the best of times because it is both boring and scary. So a gap inserts itself before getting anything done, which is spent alternating between refreshing emails on the computer and then refreshing the same emails on the phone.
But of course there are deadlines and things, so sooner or later I have to knuckle down. I start delayed, and in a bad mood. And then I have to stay late.
THE KING OF THE GAPS
Then I commute home on the tube.
In every situation I’ve listed so far, you could make a case for not using the phone. But in the commute, doubt levels are at 0%. It is a gap.
So I really go for it. I feel bad about the delays at work, and I know now that Clive hates me as a result, so I distract myself from that bad feeling.
And everyone does, they go crazy for it. You look up and down the carriages and it’s checking and sorting, swiping and refreshing. That way, they might reasonably imagine, they won’t have to do it at home.
As if phone use is a finite thing.
START BIG
Why on earth would I advocate not using the phone in literally the one gap in which it is okay to use the phone?
Because for me, my commute the king of the gaps. It’s the engine room of phone use. And it’s the only time I have to set my mind to something intentional and hard to do - to rest it.
And because phone use isn’t finite. Actually those commuters are nurturing a fungus, that will spread across all their hours. Phone use creates more phone use.
I’ve described it as feeling like a heavy iron wheel in the mind that is turning fast saying usethephoneusethephoneusethephone. The more you use it, the faster the wheel goes. So when you get where you going, you really really want to keep using it.
I learnt last week that actually there isn’t a heavy iron wheel in my mind. That my phone use had shifted to the basal ganglia and had therefore become automatic, rather than an intentional decision made in the prefrontal cortex. And that by using the phone in the commute I was strengthening this basal ganglia wiring. Whatever, I prefer the iron wheel myself. Usethephoneusethephone it says, as it turns so fast.
You might think: start small. Look at those hundreds of liminal moments during the day when you use the phone and try and fight in each of them. How’s that working for you?
I spent years doing this. I fought the war in the gaps on a thousand fronts. I tried to jam my hand in that iron wheel while it was turning at full speed. All that happened was I hurt my fingers and felt shit about myself.
I only imagined I was making an oh-so-clever judgement about the gaps. Really the phone use was automatic.
Try something different. Take a daily habitual intentional break from your phone. Retrain your brain.
That urge to use the phone isn’t going to stop immediately, it’s going to take a few weeks to slow the iron wheel. It’s going to grind and groan and sparks will fly.
Set aside some empty, quiet time in your day to get the feel of those brakes.
Use your dead time to learn to live.
HEARING THE EVIL ADVISOR
And then, in a few weeks, you are standing in the kitchen and the kettle is boiling. And no-one is around! It is a clear gap!
But now, rather than automatically picking up the phone without making a decision, for the first time you hear a voice, a voice you have patiently trained your mind to listen for all that time you were on the train. Master, it says, Master. We did check our emails five minutes ago I concede. But why don’t we check them again? Something might have changed. Let’s know for sure.
You trained your mind to hear it. And to be able to say, No, I will not, Evil Advisor.
Because if I use the phone now, though it seems harmless, I will turn the iron wheel basal ganglia thing. And I’d rather keep it slow.
You might feel a whoosh in your body, as an impulse is denied, almost a wave crashing against you inside. You notice it and you watch it with interest. And it passes.
And your son walks into the kitchen. And you aren’t looking at your phone.
And you wish - oh God, how you wish - you wish you had done this years ago.
This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the commute - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.
If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) please consider sharing with them.
“Unfortunately, small children have a gap-like quality about them. Despite all the hype, they aren’t THAT interesting.” 🤣🤣
Have to say this is one of my favourites pieces you've written – without a doubt never read the word gap so many times in an article. 😂
It’s so true how phones have crept into every gap in the day - waiting for the kettle, eating, travelling... all of it.
And the idea that we’ve trained ourselves to spot every spare second as phone-checking time is bang on - shifting from a conscious choice into something automatic, with the iron wheel spinning in the mind is great.
King of the gaps feels fitting here.
Your point about starting bigger and deliberately leaving the phone alone for a proper stretch, like during a commute, feels realistic.
I like how you turn into something positive too; more control, more awareness, and more chance to actually be present with the people around you.