Oi, Phone Dad!

Why I looked at my phone while looking after my children - and the momentum that made it impossible to stop

For several years I worked a four day week. One day a week was spent looking after my kids.

Or to put it more honestly, one day a week was looking after my kids and looking at my phone.

(We should likely add “and looking at my phone” more often to descriptions of what we are doing. “I was watching a film and looking at my phone.” If we were watched by aliens, that’s what they would report back to base.)

Fortunately I didn’t need an alien to tell me.

One day I took my three year old son to his football class. When a ball bounced near me and needed returning, the huge coach shouted “Oi, Phone Dad!”

The name stuck.

This week on the commute I’ve found myself thinking back to that time. As you all know by now, thinking time isn’t in short supply for me.

And these days I view it all very differently.

You might imagine I’m going to say I regret it more. But that’s not true. I regretted it plenty at the time. I definitely noticed I used my phone too much.

No, the change in my thinking is why I used my phone. Back then if you challenged me I would have said “Oh, a bit bored.” And if you asked me to characterise my overall habit, I’d have conceded that I was probably “addicted” to my phone.

But after many hours of reflection, I’ve realised those words hide a multitude of far, far more interesting things.

I love a bit of neuroscience. But I have to say ultimately I agree with Jonathan Haidt, who once wrote that metaphor can be a powerful way to understand the mind.

There’s a long and venerable tradition of this, from Plato’s chariot pulled by two horses, to the Buddha’s wild elephant, through to Freud’s warring provinces of the psyche.

Those thinkers grappled with profound questions. Why is the mind tempted by evil? Why does our mind seem beyond our control? How does our past live with us?

I am grappling with my habit of checking a classroom WhatsApp group, and then refreshing the same damn group five seconds later.

And, of course, why I found myself looking at my phone at my daughter’s ballet rehearsal in a way that made her cry.

Less profound perhaps, but no less interesting.

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The Iron Wheel

The philosopher Matthew Crawford wrote about how the pace of technology can alienate us from those parts of our life that we need to slow down to enjoy.

For four days each week my mind was working pretty quickly. On my day off, I expected my mind to adapt to being with the kids. And it didn’t.

The mind can’t turn on a dime. It can’t change speed quickly. It kept rumbling on at the velocity I previously set.

Imagine you swap a fast-paced day in the office for a day with a toddler who tells very very slow and mazey stories that don’t end and when you think surely this story has ended, it never does because then they say “and then” and just carry on.

Listening to that very slow story, the mind is still going pretty fast. At the speed set by the previous days. It craves something at a faster pace than the toddler’s story.

And it finds it in the phone: buttons to push, things to check, things to fix, things to check again. The fast whirring mind loves an activity centre.

I imagine a heavy iron wheel in my head. It’s turning really fast, telling me to use the phone. It’s not going to stop straight away - it has enormous momentum. This is one of the reasons I came convinced I needed to carve out some time each day to stop properly. To slow that spinning flywheel.

But in the years I worked a four day week I was nowhere near figuring that out.

I just assumed my mind would do what I asked it to.

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The Caveman’s Darkest Fear

But that’s only part of the reason.

Time to mix metaphors.

When people talk about phone use they tend to talk about scrolling. But for me with the kids, it was refreshing work emails that took up most of my energy.

That wasn’t because of any notification - I switched them all off. It wasn’t because of colleagues - they were respectful of my time and careful not to bother me. And it was rarely because I actually had work I needed to do.

No, I think when I strip it back, it was because I was plagued with a question that wouldn’t go away: “What do my colleagues think of me?”

The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has written fascinatingly about how humans have evolved to be obsessed with how they are perceived by others. We are animals that work in a team to hunt mammoth, so we are pre-programmed to make sure we eject bad hunters from the group. And that rejection from our group is our ultimate hardwired fear.

It is this caveman fear that plagued me when I worked part time. I couldn’t see the rest of my industry. But I imagined they were out there, judging me. Ready to reject me.

It drove me to check my work emails incessantly, as a way of picking up any information on this question. The LinkedIn feed was another treasure trove.

Despite all this effort, I almost never got a clear answer as to what everyone thought of me. But the searching only increased the anxiety.

At its worst there were moments that - without much evidence - I fully convinced myself that my colleagues believed I was worthless. I became panicked, and almost breathless with fear.

In these moments the phone could suddenly switch to a new role. Having failed to answer my primal need to know what others in my tribe thought of me - and having increased my anxiety massively in the process - it then offered the only distraction available from that anxiety. Scrolling became the only way to clear my head. My toddler with his long stories never had a chance.

I believe it was this strange fuel cocktail that powered my phone use.

And the more I used my phone, the more it reinforced the wiring in my brain. The iron wheel turned faster and faster. Pickups became automatic.

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What The Football Coach Should Have Said

Back in that room, I was a million miles away from the advice I needed to hear:

“That mind of yours is leaning forward, forever reaching forward. That heavy iron wheel in your head is turning so fast. It’s going to take patient work to slow it down.

You need to learn to say no to checking and fixing. Practise accepting the world as it is, and the iron wheel will turn slower each day.

And that phone of yours. It’s never going to tell you what the world thinks of you. You need to become comfortable sitting with that anxiety and knowing you will never be certain.

The answer, in all cases, is to practise accepting.”

But no-one said that.

They just said “Oi, Phone Dad”.

So I looked sheepish and kicked the ball back.

And tried really hard to watch my son playing football.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of doing nothing - 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.