You might just have to be bored
Or: How to fix an attention span.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
This is the year you’re gonna do it! Really! —Kate
A whole cottage industry has emerged around getting people off their phones. And while there are self-help books and IRL digital detoxes that literally lock your phone away from you, you’re most likely to come across this stuff … online. People who scroll social media are obviously the target audience for this content, but phone apps and phone content for getting off your phone are a lot like sustainability brands that promise to fix overconsumption with yet another product: I think you guys just want my money.
Nevertheless, whether it’s viral TikToks, time-limiting and distraction apps, or YouTube video essays, people are hungry for content that contains the secret to not consuming content. We saw this last week when Emma Weaver became the main character for tweeting about her worsening attention span: “it’s hard for me to read books, my memory is horrible and it’s hard to retain information, i miss reading but i literally can’t read. I feel so stupid? what do i do.”
Thousands of people quote-tweeted her to let her know her phone was to blame, which was not actually an answer to her question. As someone who has made plenty of contributions to the getting-off-your-phone content industry, I can confidently say that the real solution is not that complicated. There’s no theory to learn or science to practice. You don’t have to do anything to fix your attention span. You just have to be bored.
This isn’t fun to hear because the media environment has ramped up so steadily over the past few years that boredom now feels like some kind of human rights violation. But if you’re looking to unlearn the need for constant stimulation, then that requires abstaining from constant stimulation—not all at once, which I think is the most common method that leads to this feeling impossible, but slowly and intentionally.
I started this years ago when I stopped allowing myself to use Twitter on the weekends. My job relied on keeping up with every bit of culture news, and scrolling felt necessary even when I was “off the clock.” But as it turns out, it wasn’t, and after a few months I deleted the app from my phone so I could only use Twitter on web at the office. Then I started identifying other phone-based behavior I didn’t like. The biggest of those things was my need to compulsively document and share every hour of my life on Instagram Stories. I took a year off. Now, I have a one-hour daily limit for Instagram and TikTok combined.
Every single time I made these choices, I soon got bored. I was bored when I couldn’t look at Twitter during my commute. I was bored when I had caught up on my Instagram feed but couldn’t go to Stories. I’m bored whenever I see the TikTok app greyed out because I’ve hit my limit. But boredom is when life happens.
Boredom is when you do the dishes, run the errand you’ve been putting off, respond to the text you’ve left on read. Boredom is when you bring a book to read on the subway or make small talk with the person in front of you in line about how slow the pharmacy is. Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own.
I can’t pretend to be a perfect model for phone/life balance. I spent the entire day after a holiday party last month in bed, requesting 15 more minutes of TikTok until I’d made a mockery of my self-imposed time limit. But as “use phone less” comes back around as a new year's resolution, I can at least offer the perspective of someone who now does use phone less.
It’s what you do with that necessary boredom that becomes the reward. I just feel better after watching a movie, doing a craft while playing an audiobook, or cleaning while listening to a podcast through my headphones instead of going into a social media black hole. That’s not to mention the rewards of “enjoying a story” and “having a clean apartment.” And while improved quality of day-to-day life is nothing to sneeze at, there have been tangible long-term rewards as well. In November, I wrote 20,000 words of a novel I’ve been trying and failing to even start writing since 2018, all because I began designating the first hour of my mornings to writing instead of scrolling (shoutout to The Artist’s Way).
It’s likely nothing in this newsletter is news to you, like how we know exercising regularly, drinking water, and going to sleep early make us feel better in the long run but often opt instead for the short-term reward of watching one more episode or not having to pee every fucking five minutes. There’s no trick to getting those rewards other than to just do the thing, and it’s the same with your phone. While technology does tap into our brain in unprecedented ways, and legitimate scrolling addiction exists, I’m certainly guilty of over-intellectualizing the novelty of technology as a way to avoid any personal accountability for my bad habits. It’s Meta’s fault, not mine! But unless you suffer from a more serious addiction, cutting down your phone use is no more impossible than waking up early to run: It sucks. I hate it. I’m so, so glad I did it.