It’s half-term, so here’s an updated post from earlier in the year that a reader reminded me of.
Nearly ten months of commuting in a high-vis vest means a lot of conversations with strangers about phones. Everyone is supportive (well, those who talk to me anyway). Everyone hates their phone. But I’ve noticed something: phone use is no-one’s number one worry.
I get that. There are very real problems in the world. And we’ve each got our own particular thing that keeps us up at night.
People are definitely bothered by other people’s phone use. Maybe their husband or their kids.
But their own phone use? Everyone recognises they use it too much, and everyone has tried and failed many times to reduce it.
But, if they were drawing up a list of worries, they’d likely put it at around number four.
Meanwhile, in Ancient Rome
Boethius was a man with problems.
A high-ranking Roman official, he had been accused of treason and imprisoned. He suffered the indignity of a sudden and dramatic fall. He then suffered the further indignity of being a story in every self-help book ever, which is where I encountered him.
In the months he spent in his drab cell, Boethius narrated his journey from rage at his bad luck and intense fear of his upcoming execution, through to extraordinary peace and acceptance.
He described a series of imaginary conversations with Lady Philosophy, who helped him see comfort in the transitory nature of fortune and his own virtue. He couldn’t change his circumstances, but he could change how he perceived them.
The resultant work The Consolation of Philosophy is said to be an exceptionally powerful expression of an important truth. If you change your mind, you change your world. Our internal perspective doesn’t just observe, it creates everything.
We see this truth again and again when we see people in fabulous circumstances who are deeply unhappy, and people in the worst who have managed to be cheerful.
Boethius didn’t change his situation, or solve any of his problems. But through a brutal internal struggle, he came to peace with them.
The cruellest punishment of all
Let’s try a thought experiment for a second.
In prison, Boethius complained of being cut off from his library. He only had his own thoughts.
Let’s imagine that wasn’t the case.
And some evil Roman jailer put a phone in there with him.
I’d bet he’d never have been visited by Lady Philosophy if Lady TikTok was there to tempt him.
I find it near impossible to get my thoughts together if I have a phone to hand. My train of thought begins on its journey confidently, then I instinctively pick up the phone and before I know it I catch a glimpse of my train of thought chugging off in a totally different direction and I know it’ll take ages to turn it around.
And I’m especially vulnerable to the phone if times are hard. Boethius would have alternated between repeatedly refreshing the status of his appeal application on the Roman government’s website and then the hardcore distractions of 10 Gladiator Fights That Shocked Everyone.
I’m pretty sure he would have found himself scrolling the platitudes you can get on Pinterest, Instagram and (yes) Substack Notes. In a cruel twist of fate, some of these platitudes would have been exactly the “our life is the creation of our mind” message he needed.
But Boethius wouldn’t have been able to absorb them in bite-size. Minds don’t work that way.
My bet is that a phone would have been the very cruellest punishment you could give Boethius. I think he needed silence and introspection to come to that extraordinary peace.
Back in Surbiton
In the years since I made my daughter cry, I became fascinated by my failure to reduce my phone use and determined to do anything to cut it down.
But if at any point you’d have asked me what really kept me up at night, it would have been everything else. Work, money, the state of the world, the weird smell in the car.
I had no idea that my seemingly unrelated efforts to tackle my phone use would help me handle all these (very real) worries much better.
But I should have figured this out.
Phones squeeze out healing periods of being bored, of silence and introspection.
I suspect that phone use, with its constant checking and fixing, makes us feel more anxious. That anxiety doesn’t just manifest as a general state, we feel anxious about something. The thing we are anxious about isn’t a made up thing, it’s a pre-existing real thing - we just view it more darkly.
In this way, phones hide their damage.
Then, when we are at our lowest ebb, they present themselves as omnipresent distraction to relieve this anxiety.
Though I hope your problems aren’t as bad as those facing Boethius, I’ll bet they feel more pressing than your inability to put down the phone.
Boethius would definitely have noticed his scrolling addiction. But I’d reckon he’d put it at problem number four, behind his loss of status, his imprisonment and the fact he would soon be brutally beaten to death.
Phone use isn’t his biggest problem. But it is what’s standing in the way of him finding peace.
Clearing a bit of space didn’t solve my problems. But it did make them look a whole lot more manageable.
Thank you! If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing.
Next week: Very likely an article about how I forgot to read the news every day. But last week I promised an article I then didn’t have time to write, so please don’t hold me to it.
Confused as to what all this 1,000 hours of nothing business is about? Start here.
Being deliberate about usage is the important bit for phones, imo, PFW.
Sometimes when I go walking, my phone is continually in and out of my pocket to note down things for my 'to do' list. Sometimes I won't touch it in more than 4 hours.
If you haven't, get stuck into Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning to accompany your Roman dude's thinking and musing.