Some thoughts on why I have permanently altered my relationship with my smartphone and social media (which will henceforth be referred to collectively as “technology”). 

Technology is a slot machine

Gambling addictions are insidious and ruin people’s lives. While there is no immediately financial consequence from using your smartphone, the same mechanisms that empower gambling addictions from slot machines are at play in smartphones — instead of wasting away your money however, you are wasting away your time and attention.

A smartphone is a slot machine, but one that several billion people around the world play 150 times a day. Just like with casino slot machines, social media applications on your smartphone utilize intermittent variable rewards: the occasional “like” on a photo or the periodic notification from a text message. App designers, like casino engineers, know that addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.

From Tristan Harris, a former Google Design Ethicist:

  • When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got.
  • When we pull to refresh our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what new email we got.
  • When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.
  • When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.
  • When we tap the # of red notifications, we’re playing a slot machine to what’s underneath.

Technology preys on our insecurities

Most notably, technology exploits our FOMSI (fear of missing something important), which is essentially the rationalization used by people who claim that we need to be glued to our technology in the chance that we could miss something important. What on earth could be so important that you would trade your full attention and focus for? If something is truly urgent and someone needs to reach you, they will call you. You will still find out about the interesting, “must-know” events and activities in due time, but it doesn’t require you to be constantly distracted and checking your cell phone in every single waking moment. Relax — you will still be in touch with the world and all its glorious happenings.

Technology is a bottomless bowl

Research has found that when participants are given a constantly-refilling bowl of soup (a “bottomless bowl”), people eat 73% more calories than those with normal bowls and underestimate how many calories they ate by 140 calories. Technology has hit upon a central human vulnerability: Take an experience that was once bounded and finite, and turn it into a bottomless flow, and users will continue to consume even when they aren’t hungry anymore.

Technology exploits this human behavior by providing endless “bottomless bowls” of low-value content designed to capture your attention — Facebook’s infinite News Feed, YouTube’s Related Videos section, Netflix’s autoplay feature, and so much more. Realize that you are being overstuffed with mental “junk food,” and cut the fat from your diet. Your body and mind are interconnected — just like how you strive to follow a healthy diet, be conscious about what you “feed” to your brain.