Who Keeps Picking Up The Phone All The Time?

Wasn't me

I’ve been doing my daily high vis phone free commute for nearly six months now.

But I haven’t fully explained how it all started.

Not fully.

First some important context: my family are terrible at stacking the dishwasher.

I too was once ignorant like them, and had to live with the consequences of that. One day I was drinking from a glass of water and I was horrified to discover it was full of weird orange gunk powder.

I had long imagined that the dishwasher rained water on items from above. I say imagined - it’s more like this was my default opinion, the unconscious impression one has about something that you’ve never given any real thought.

But after a little patient study, I saw that jets of water are pushed out of the spinny arms BELOW each tray.

After working to gain a better understanding of how dishwashers work, I now know how to stack the dishwasher far better. For example, I now NEVER put little plastic cups in the bottom. If I do, I know that the jets of water make them fly up and fall through the gaps, blocking the arm from spinning.

This is wisdom I patiently share with my family almost daily.

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I didn’t want to spend any time learning about the dishwasher. Dishwashers are boring. But I had to.

So it was with my mind.

For most of my life I found stuff about the mind to be deeply boring and off-putting. So I never took any interest.

Even as, entering my forties, I was feeling increasingly anxious day and night. Often about work. I was feeling glum about life ahead, and sometimes urgently panicky.

Yet I still wasn’t interested in my mind, because these feelings did not make for a compelling mystery. Actually it seemed like a pretty common experience in midlife.

But there was one area of my life which did feel like an interesting problem to solve.

In the years since the ballet recital disaster, I had been trying everything to reduce my phone use and failing. I had a real bee in my bonnet. But no matter what I did, I was compulsively picking up the phone any time, day and night.

And then one day, I noticed something I believed to be fascinating. I was standing in the kitchen with my phone in my hand, and I was convinced - absolutely convinced - that I didn’t deliberately pick it up.

I had very clearly done so automatically, with no conscious choice that I could remember.

It felt like an insight that was new and at the same time oddly familiar. Like I had always known this on some level, but not paid attention until now.

It was the first time I properly wondered why I was doing something that I didn’t decide to do.

Clearly my mind didn’t work in the way I imagined. If I did give it any thought, I would have guessed it was almost like a little guy in my head, looking out of my eyes, pulling little levers to make things happen. But here something had happened without a decision.

Driven as much by curiosity as a desire to reduce my phone use, I watched carefully. I looked out for those moments where my body did stuff without me consciously deciding to do so. And I started to see it everywhere.

The hidden me bit my nails. It could drive quite a long way without my conscious mind intervening. It could play football - it seemed extremely clear my conscious mind was rarely involved in that. And of course it used the phone a tonne. It loved doing that more than anything.

Who’s me?

What was the nature of this hidden me that did all these things?

And why did it keep eating cheese from the fridge like an apple, without cutting it nicely with a knife?

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I read a lot. Philosophy, neuroscience, contemplative traditions.

Funnily enough, I wasn’t the first person to notice this curious division in the mind. A lot of writers described it with metaphor - for example, an iceberg, with the conscious aware mind that could see and hear and feel at the top and a vast unconscious mind below it, making decisions for hidden reasons.

None of this implied anything supernatural or cosmological. I could see why some people felt the universe was speaking to them, but me personally it never felt that way. (Not least because these cosmic forces kept directing me to the fridge to eat ingredients that had already been set aside for a future meal. It seemed odd that the universe would do that).

Far from being unscientific, this division seemed to fit with a lot of science. Stuff I had heard about but not paid much attention to all my life. Hypnosis. Brainwashing. Subliminal messaging. These were all methods of speaking to, and influencing, the unconscious mind.

And this division seemed to make sense of a tonne of self-help. The clue is in the name I guess. All sorts of advice seemed underpinned by the notion of trying to trick the hidden mind as if it were a third party. Almost as if it were a wayward child.

In my mid-40s I found myself wondering why I hadn’t clocked this division before, and whether I was unusually stupid. It was odd. It seemed I had known all this in the abstract but not accepted it as actually pertaining to me.

Or, like the dishwasher, I had an imagination of my mind that was default and had never been challenged, even in a cursory way.

Why was I so thick?

But I didn’t have time to focus on that. I had a more pressing problem.

The hidden part of my mind was a phone-addicted dick.

I needed to find a way to get to it.

And correct it.

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To be continued.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) feel free to share the joy of Phone Free Will.