I take my phone out when I’m not immediately occupied with something. It’s almost automatic. I even do it while I am at a real computer, in the gaps between tasks. In every idle moment, in every moment that isn’t idle but feels close enough to it, my hand reaches into my pocket.
For a long time, my phone and computer, were largely gateways to reddit. I have spent more hours than I want to think about scrolling reddit. It seemed to be my default setting. Eventually I quit. I really didn’t like just how much time I was spending there, and how little I got for that time. They say that time you enjoyed is not time wasted, but how much did I really enjoy all those memes and articles presenting dubious facts?
I still keep reaching for my phone though. And as much as Mastodon and Bluesky market themselves as “healthier” kinds of social media, is it really so much better to unthinkingly swap between checking them in every spare moment? I doubt it. Sometimes I even ask myself: it’s been ten minutes since I last looked at my phone. What do I really expect to have happened in those ten minutes?
But lately something new has been happening. Now, often, when I am sitting at my computer, I will find myself idly thinking “I should write a blog post.” I’ve gotten into a habit of opening my blog folder first thing when I turn my computer on. It’s not as addictive as the urge to look at my phone—indeed, I paused to do that multiple times even as I was writing this—but it’s a familiar thing now. A little rut in the neural road is forming.
You can overdo blogging, of course. You can overdo anything. But the way I see it, if you overdo anything, it’s better for it to be something that involves thinking and making something, rather than just passively consuming. So I like this better.
What are your default activities? What do your hands do, where does your attention go when the world isn’t demanding it strongly enough?