Search Engine
How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Fri, 16 May 2025
This week we ask a slightly absurd question – is there technology to stop you from using addictive technology – and get some surprising answers from The Verge's David Pierce. New developments in the anti-technology field, and a partial history of how our phones got so oppressive. Comment on this episode! Support the show, and get ad-free episodes! Listeners' favorite Search Engine episodes To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What technology can help reduce phone addiction?
Hey, everybody. This is some pretty big news, which is why we're announcing it before the show. Friday, May 30th, Search Engine is hosting our very first Falafel Friday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time, United States. What that means is that we are inviting you to join us on Zoom for lunch. That morning, I'm going to send out a Zoom link.
And at noon, the search engine team is going to be there hanging out with a surprise guest who I will have questions for, who you can send questions to in the chat, and bring food. It can be falafel. It can be something else that is similarly alliterative. I'm not the boss of you. But please join us for lunch, 12 p.m. Eastern on Friday, May 30th. We are going to send out a Zoom link that morning.
This event is strictly for our incognito mode members. If you've not already joined, please consider signing up at searchengine.show. Falafel Friday, May 30th. Look for a link that morning in your inbox. Lately, I've been thinking about my phone. My phone and how much I look at it. I would love to be talking about a more interesting problem.
I can't stop looking at my phone is unfortunately a terminal cliche, but our problems sometimes choose us. I worry sometimes that in some afterlife, I'll be forced to watch myself from my phone's perspective. Some years-long montage of all the moments where my mouth was half open, where my finger gluttonously swiped, where carpal tunnel blossomed, while behind my head, life whooshed by.
If the internet sometimes feels like a confusingly addictive drug, confusing because it offers more lows than highs, maybe it's useful to compare all this to drinking. For people who drink, they hope that they're social drinkers. They try not to become alcoholics. But there's something in between. Gray area drinking. In the gray area, alcohol might not be ruining your life. Nobody's worried.
But your intuition tells you your consumption is off. That these are not the choices you'd make if you were still entirely choosing. That's how I've been feeling about the way I use my phone lately. Gray area. And I've noticed people around me who are just not in the gray. One friend of mine, I realized, had entirely stopped using his phone on the weekends.
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Chapter 2: What personal experiences led to a desire for less phone use?
Another had begun using a mysterious gadget called The Brick to take some functionality away from his phone. I found it thrilling to think that some people were finding their own solutions, and it made me want to look for my own. And I wondered, rather than meditation or some magical upgrade to my self-control, was there technology that could maybe help solve my technology problem?
So I called a tech journalist whose work I've followed for years. Can you just introduce yourself and say what you do?
Sure. My name is David Pierce. I'm the editor-at-large at The Verge, which is a meaningless title that means I report and write about technology all the time.
How long have you been professionally reporting on thinking about writing about technology?
I think it's 15 years on the dot now. The answer is technically a little longer because I had a tech blog in college that no one ever read. But people have been giving me money to write about technology for almost exactly 15 years.
David has covered pretty much anything tech-related you can imagine. But one thing he does that I particularly appreciate is he writes these very clear-eyed reviews of new technology, which is super hard to do well. I should know. I read this kind of thing a lot. Like, a lot, a lot.
David is special because he somehow has room for optimism about new gadgets and also healthy amounts of skepticism about the companies behind them. I'm curious, what happened in your life that made you think, oh, I think I want to use my phone less?
I don't know that I had a individual specific moment so much as kind of a collection of things over time, right? I think the story you hear from people a lot is like my five-year-old kid came up to me and said, dad, why do you love your phone more than me? And that was the moment I decided. And my kid is two, so he's like not aware enough to know to say that to me yet.
I'm sure that's coming, but I haven't really had moments like that. But I think one moment I think back to a lot was several years ago, my wife and I got, asked on this very last minute vacation. My friend Jason was like, I'm going to the Sequoia National Forest for the weekend, do you want to come? We were just like, cool, big house in the Sequoia National Forest, sounds awesome, let's go.
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Chapter 3: How can changing phone charging locations impact usage?
The next week, while turning it into an episode, collaborating on some cuts, working on the writing that goes in between, I was remote at a conference in Scandinavia. And that week away, I was more tightly glued to my phone than usual, waiting to get some clarity on some possible bad news in my personal life.
Everybody has or will have one of these weeks where you just wait for the news, news about yourself, or worse, someone you love, and you wonder when it'll arrive. And if so, will this be one of those chapters of life that pulls you under the surface for a while, into grief world?
So you wait for the bad news, knowing that when it arrives, it'll arrive, of course, on your phone as just one more buzz, another bid for your attention in the daily parade. Phones, of course, did not invent anxiety. We've gotten bad news from telegrams, from knocks on the door. Phones have just tightened its leash. So for a week, even more than usual, my phone tortured me.
It tortured me in a way that was both abject and a little bit hilarious. I found myself trying to take in the beauty of a field of wildflowers alongside a fjord, just willing my nervous system to flood with wonder instead of the anxiety about the buzz I'd just felt. Was this spam from a retailer? A note from a friend? News? My news? How did we end up with these infernal chittering devices?
I looked into it and the push notification, it turns out, was not invented by the devil. It was invented by Canadian software developers, a team at a company called Research in Motion. Research in Motion invented a phone you might remember called the Blackberry, a phone with a little keyboard and the first push notifications.
Meaning if someone sent you an email, you didn't have to go check for it. Your Blackberry would just buzz. It would proactively tell you there was something new to see. I never owned a BlackBerry, but I was an early adopter to the device that would replace it.
This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.
I remember the Steve Jobs presentation. I remember him on stage in his black turtleneck.
Three things. a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.
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Chapter 4: What is the value of using a dumb phone?
I think the winds of change are blowing all across America.
I was tracking what I naively thought was the most interesting election America would ever have.
George Bush and John McCain are out of ideas. They are out of touch. And if you stand with me in 70 days, they'll be out of time.
I'd often read politics blogs in my downtime, but when I was done reading, the information left me alone. The internet, despite being in my pocket, was a place I was still choosing to visit, not something seeping under my front door.
That is where the push notification service comes in.
but push notifications for iPhones arrived in 2009.
No matter what application you're in, you won't miss them. And you can provide buttons on them where if they're selected by the user, will automatically launch your application.
And after them, a competing ecosystem of apps, each trying to burrow more deeply into your nervous system than its competitors. Facebook started pushing notifications in early 2010, Twitter at the end of that year. News apps like the New York Times and its competitors, they really only started barraging me and you with breaking news alerts in 2016.
Like a lot of problems in modern society, things didn't get bad because one person wanted them to be a certain way. We just created a system of incentives where if anyone behaved well, they'd be quickly overtaken by someone willing to behave worse.
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Chapter 5: How did push notifications change our relationship with phones?
That's why the world works with ServiceNow. More at servicenow.de slash AI for people.
Welcome back to the show. So to recap, we learned earlier in this episode that there were some crude solutions that were helping David Pierce, a long cord sleeping with the phone outside his bedroom. And there were some tech solutions that seemed promising on paper, but in my opinion, did not actually work so well. Dumb phones, Apple Watches.
But the good news, it turned out at the time we were talking, technology has actually started to turn a corner. There were solutions David was actually excited about. He told me about this strange device invented by two frustrated Gen Z college students. It was the one I'd noticed at a friend's house, the Brick.
So Brick was created by these two friends who were college friends at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Their names are TJ and Zach. They have... grown up in the iPhone world in a way that, like, I'm 36, and I think I'm about the last person who remembers the world before smartphones. For them, like, if you're in your 20s now, everyone has had it the whole time. And
They had essentially the same problem that I did with the screen time limits, which is that they're too easy to get past and you can just ignore them. So they pretty quickly came to this idea that what they needed was some kind of separate physical blocker. And there are things out there. Have you ever seen the Yonder case? This is the thing you get at like concerts.
Yeah, or honestly comedy. If they want to make sure that the audience can't film, they'll make you put your phone in this Yonder case that can only be unlocked by the venue.
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Chapter 6: What were the early days of the iPhone like?
Yeah, that's right. So the Yonder case is one of the things out there, but that's mostly, like you said, used at events and stuff. They wanted something that you can just have in your house. The brick is not some hugely complicated piece of technology. It's this two-inch by two-inch cube. It's gray, it's super boring, and then it's a magnet underneath. And it is...
basically designed to be stuck somewhere, like on the side of your fridge or, you know, on your desk or something like that. And you tap it and it quote unquote bricks your phone.
In case you're not yet picturing this, you have a little plastic square in your house, probably where you leave your house keys. When you tap your phone against the square, it turns off every single app on your phone you've labeled as distracting. Your iPhone becomes as dumb a phone as you want it to be until you tap the square again.
So if you were going to the park, you could tap your phone against the brick and kill Instagram and email and everything but your map and text messages. And when you get home, you could tap again and turn your phone all the way back on.
There's just enough friction there. And it also makes it a thing I have to stand up and go do. Like now, if I'm sitting here and looking at my phone and I want to use Instagram, I have to go upstairs, tap my phone on the thing, and then come back downstairs and look at Instagram. And there's something really powerful in just that moment of, I have to have said out loud that I want to do this.
that really works.
And if we're thinking of this as I'm forcing you to help me turn Search Engine for one episode into a product review podcast, like if this was a product review, what doesn't work about the brick that you wish you could change?
So one is it's very expensive. Each of those little tiny readers that don't really do anything is $59. Oh, wow. And so the idea of having a few of these adds up fast. The other thing is it's really, sort of a blunt instrument, right?
It doesn't have sort of a schedule that understands like what you're doing and the idea that like, oh, I actually need to check this one thing, but only for two minutes, and then I don't want to be able to look at it again. It's also, I should say, a really... easy habit to break. The reason that it works is that it is really straightforward to do.
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