Everyone's Favourite Toy

We all worry about protecting kids from phones. Won’t someone PLEASE think of the adults?

We are excellent at seeing others’ phone use.

When I use my own phone, it’s quite subtle. Just a quick check.

When my wife uses her phone, I huff and wait impatiently for her. And remind her about an article we both read about phubbing.

But it’s my kids who really stick out like a sore thumb.

When I look up from a necessary and important phone task that needs to be done right now and see my children uselessly messaging, there is an immediate and intense irritation.

It compels me to immediately launch the app that monitors their phone use, and then to Google how many hours a day they should be using it for.

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Big news in phone world

One of the dangers of becoming a high vis idiot is that it’s actually turning me into a real idiot. I miss a lot of news.

Keen-eyed readers will have detected a bit of a humblebrag. Not following the news is getting pretty fashionable. I’ll run through the pros and cons in a later post (especially as my day job is as a TV producer - please don’t tell my bosses).

This week on the commute, someone mentioned the Meta/Google case. They said it was shocking. I didn’t know what it was. To my eternal discredit, I nodded and agreed.

I then spent the remainder of the journey home, some 40 minutes, tormented by a desire to look it up. Once again the high vis vest had to work very hard.

For others who’ve never heard of this, Meta and Google were found liable for the mental health problems of a young woman living in California who was a heavy social media user. The design of their services like Instagram and YouTube was found to be inherently addictive.

The world is rightly convinced that children need to be protected from this.

And the world will get round to that in a minute, they just need to check something on their phone first really quickly.

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The Kitchen Epiphany

My daughter has been a huge part of my long battle with the phone. This all started when I made her cry by looking at my phone instead of her at a ballet rehearsal. In the years after, I battled my phone and lost - whatever I tried, I could never get in control of my usage.

Then we got my daughter a phone. And watching her pick it up, my frustration with my own usage was gradually blended with fascination. I became genuinely interested in why these devices were so inescapably compelling.

Like many parents I read Jon Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.

Amid the mountains of evidence of phone harm, one innocuous-seeming section changed my life.

It cited an experiment in which young women were exposed to images of very thin women and average-sized women. They found that the subjects exposed to images of very thin women were made more anxious about their bodies. Not particularly surprising.

But here’s the thing - the subjects were only shown the images for 20 milliseconds, which was too fast for them to be consciously aware of what they were seeing.

I’ve heard of subliminal messaging before. But for some reason this particular example stayed with me.

Around this time, I had a lifechanging experience. I was in the kitchen holding my phone and was absolutely certain I didn’t decide to pick it up.

It was the experience that ultimately led me to believe that my conscious willpower was useless in fighting my phone. I became convinced that my mind was on a pre-laid track, so it would not only pick up the phone automatically, but also demolish any obstacles I might put in the way of that.

There’s mountains of evidence that our minds work in very strange ways. But for some reason reading about this experiment and then watching myself closely as I used the phone… it really cut through.

How could my mind be affected by something I couldn’t directly perceive? How could my mind do something I didn’t want it to?

It made me feel like my conscious experience of the world, the little man inside my head seeing out of my eyes and pulling levers… that that was only part of my mind.

That there was more to my brain than what I could perceive. I’m not describing anything cosmic or woo woo or unscientific here - as I read more about the neuroscience, the more it became overwhelmingly obvious.

For me at least, it led me to devote hours to retraining this rogue part of my brain.

In a high vis vest.

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Adults: not looking very adult on the commute

We protect children for a number of very good reasons.

Their brains are still being formed. And they don’t have the life experience to cope with potentially harmful content.

But if we seek to protect them because they don’t have effective control over themselves, then we should be aware that we adults are equally vulnerable.

On the commute, it doesn’t look a lot like people have control over their phone use.

It doesn’t look like literally everyone is intentionally choosing to pick them up.

As an overall scene, it looks chillingly automatic. The product of unconscious impulse multiplied by a train carriage.

And it doesn’t look at all fair on them.

It’s worth remembering that Meta and Google lost the case not because the court decided that the content was harmful. It was because the design was inherently addictive.

Irresistible, you might say.

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As I say, we are excellent at noticing others’ phone use.

I remember years ago I watched a documentary about social workers.

A dad was about to lose custody of his kid. In order to make a final decision, the social workers set up a room full of toys, invited the dad and his toddler son in, and watched them play together for an hour.

While the two year old explored the toys, the dad sat and looked at his phone.

Back then, I was tempted to judge that dad terribly. I marvelled at him in horror. How could you scroll in this very moment, when you are literally being assessed for one hour so you can prove you can keep your kid?

I’m not so sure of myself now.

[Images by AI, words all human]