The Death of Daydreaming

Last year I took a smartphone holiday for 4 months (switched to a dumbphone). It was a fantastic time and I regret "falling off the wagon" and getting a smartphone again.

I noticed a huge number of benefits, but one of the most surprising was that it forced me to confront a number of difficult decisions.

There were a few times in which I was bored (waiting at the passport office, sitting on a plane) in which I started to think about decisions I had to make that were very difficult in ways that caused me anxiety: firing a person I'm good friends with, shutting down a company, stuff like that.

I realized that ordinarily I would simply refuse to engage with the decision: I'd get on my phone or "get busy" somehow and so simply postpone thinking about the issue indefinitely.

But when you're stuck at the passport office for 2 hours with nothing to do, you can't but help think about the thing that is top of mind, anxiety be damned.

For someone that is prone to anxiety around certain topics (conflict avoidance, "disappointing" people, etc) having times in which I was forced to engage with the topic had truly enormous benefits.

> you can't but help think about the thing that is top of mind, anxiety be damned.

This really captures what I think is the main problem with our state of being constantly distracted: it feels at first like a relief from anxiety, but ultimately results in even small anxieties never properly being dealt with. The end result is a vicious cycle (or I guess virtuous if you sell online ads) of becoming more and more anxious causing us to rely more and more on the screen to distract us, which in turn only increases that backlog of anxiety.

I see this happen in a lot of younger people that are constantly on screens: they frequently mention their need to "chill for a bit" and yet spend most of their time doing nothing but staring at a screen. It's clear that they are living in a lukewarm vat of anxiety that they can't face while staring at a screen, but also one which causes them immediate stress when they do look away.

That is basically what psychiatrists have been saying about the topic.

Humans need downtime to process emotions - in the olden days there was a lot of menial work which served this purpose, but we automated most of it since, freeing time for more productive, but stressful activities.

Meanwhile looking at screens allows one to leave all that for later. Unfortunately unprocessed emotions don't go away - they pile up.

I've been using this to gauge how well I'm doing mentally and address whatever issues there might be. My ideal state is that of a chimpanzee who was finally let outside after years in captivity which, upon leaving the building where it was kept, just stares at the sky.