Hello friend 👋
It's Monday, brand new week ahead of us.
Two days back I ran out of salt in my kitchen cabinet, nothing dramatic. So I picked up my phone for exactly that one reason, to add salt to my grocery list. That's it. One well defined job.
I unlocked it. There was a notification, so I tapped it. Nope, it wasn't urgent, it could have waited, but that click took me to my email. That email had a link, so I clicked it. The link opened YouTube. Next thing I know 35 minutes disappeared before I looked up and realised the salt never made it onto the list.
And here's the thing, this isn't a one-off behavior. It happens to me more than once a day. I reach for the phone to do a thing, and the thing just quietly vanishes. For a while I brushed it off. But this can't be just me. I'd be on the train, look up, and every second person left and right is buried in a screen, and I'd think, so what, back in the days people used to bury their heads in newspapers too. Same habit, different object. That's the excuse I kept handing myself to avoid taking any action on my phone usage.
Interestingly the comparison with a newspaper doesn't actually hold up, and once I saw why, I couldn't unsee it.
A newspaper ends. It has a last page. You finish it and you're done. Your phone never ends, and it doesn't just go forever, it's unpredictable. That turns out to be the whole game.
There was this psychologist, Skinner, who figured out something odd about how our brains are wired. Turns out if you reward someone the same way every single time, they get bored of it fast. But make that reward random, so they never know when it's coming or what it'll be, and suddenly they are hooked. It's the exact thing that makes a slot machine a slot machine. And it's the exact thing your phone does to you every time you unlock it. Your brain thinks maybe there's a text from someone you love. Maybe a like on something you recently posted. Maybe something funny is on your feed. Maybe nothing at all. And that 'maybe' is the whole hook. Because here's the strange part: the little hit of dopamine doesn't come when you find something good. It comes a second before, in the not-knowing, in the wanting, in the pull.
The newspaper or a magazine could never do that. Same words every time you looked. Your phone reshuffles the whole deck every second, curated especially for you, built by very clever people whose actual job is keeping you pulling the lever.
You see it everywhere once you know the pattern:
Netflix isn't fighting HBO. It's fighting your 11pm decision to go to bed.
TikTok doesn't want your attention. It wants the seconds between your thoughts.
Spotify doesn't compete with radio. It competes with silence.
Which means my little salt disaster wasn't me being weak. I was basically a rat in a very beautiful box, doing exactly what the box was designed to make me do.
And honestly? That was a relief. Because if the problem is "I have no willpower," all I can do is feel bad about myself. But if the problem is "I'm sitting at a slot machine." You can't win a willpower fight against a slot machine. You just don't sit down at it in the first place.
So that's the small experiment this week. Next time you grab your phone, say the one thing out loud first. Then do only that, and put the phone down. And when you feel the pull to keep scrolling, and you will, just notice it. That pull is the lever. It's a lot easier to walk past once you can actually feel it for what it is.
You're not quitting your phone. You're just taking back the 35 minutes you could have used it for something intentional.
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Cheers,
Narman
Your Monday buddy, still catching himself mid-scroll