Why I detoxed from my smartphone

In december 2022 I was walking in the forest with two friends. One of them, who is a church pastor, said he was going to preach a series on smartphone use. To which I responded: are you happy with the way you are living with your smartphone yourself? He wasn’t, and neither were we. And so we decided to start detoxing at the start of the new year.

Reasons for myself

We started by describing for ourselves why we wanted to ‘detox’. I listed a number of reasons:

1. Addiction. I felt unfree. I took my phone at many moments I actually didn’t want to: when I was tired, as soon as I sat on the toilet, when I felt difficult emotions, etc.). When I took my phone I often used my phone for things I didn’t intent. I took it out to watch at a certain app, but minutes later I found myself looking at a completely different app without much of a conscious choice. I felt unfree. It just happened, without me really wanting to.
2. Stolen attention. When using my phone my attention was often grabbed by things I hadn’t chosen to focus my attention on: messages from people or groups, a notification from the school-app of my children, a notification from “Marktplaats” app, etc. Instead of being a passive ‘tool’ (like a hammer) waiting for me to pick it up whenever I need it, my phone ‘called’ me to use it when I actually did not want it. They were mostly just small moments, minutes – a message here, a notification there. But taken all together it is precious time being ‘lost’ to things that are not actually important. Time I would have rather spent on attending the here and now (hearing a bird sing), processing information and emotions, prayer, thinking about others, creativity, and deep focus and study. I noticed that countless times these things had been pushed aside by my phone.
3. Avoiding challenges. I noticed that I took my phone as a distraction at moments that I actually had to do something difficult: thinking about a difficult problem, having a difficult conversation, making that call, etc. I used my phone to ‘drug’ myself to avoid uncomfortable emotions. Instead of ‘feeling’ what was going on and processing, I took my phone and distracted myself.
4. Overstimulation / exhaustion. Everytime I opened WhatsApp I saw messages that I did not at that moment have time to respond to. But once I had seen them, they were like opened windows on the ‘desktop’ of my consciousness. It was somewhere in the back of my mind, fracturing my attention and raising my stress levels. All those messages where there, waiting for my response… Moreover this very often led to dissatisfaction after a day of work. All day I had been busy responding to emails and on top of that to WhatsApp messages (from people becoming impatient because I had not yet responded to their emails). But at the end of the day I thought: what have I been doing? I was busy all day, but with what exactly?
5. A prison of belonging. Because of all this I felt the smartphone also blocked a real change in lifestyle on other areas of life, that I was longing for. I longed to live a more sustainable life (withing the boundaries of this earth). But it was like the smartphone kept me locked in a system of speed, efficiency, belonging and status quo. I hoped that stepping ‘out’ would also give me more freedom to be different in other areas of live, to dear to divert from the mainstream.

Reasons for others

These where all reasons I had for myself. But on top of that, and maybe even stronger, weighed the reasons I say in relation to others:

1. A bad example. By being addicted to my phone I was a bad example to others. All of the negative things named above, were part of the lifestyle I was modeling to my children, to students I work with, etc. I didn’t want that.
2. Exclusion. I noticed that I was personally bothered by the smartphone use of others. If someone I’m connecting with is on their phone, I feel excluded. If someone in your presence reads a book or even a newspaper on an iPad it’s different than when someone takes his phone. Probably because you don’t know what they’re doing and they are very likely to be interacting with other people, while they are physically with you. I didn’t like that feeling myself at all, and I didn’t want others to feel the same. Cf. Jonathan Haidt: we’re constantly carrying along a portal that takes us away from the present moment and the people we love.
3. Acceleration. The smartphone contributes to the acceleration of our society. When I want something to be done quickly, I app. And I expect a quick reply. It’s efficient, but it also leads to stress, burn-out and estrangement. And Dallas Willard famously said: if you are a Christian, at least do this: “radically remove all hurry from your life”.
4. Depression and anxiety with youth. With the research of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation) it has now been proved that social media and smartphones are really harming a young generation. Young people are losing social skills, are sick of the constant comparison with others. They are way more depressed and anxious then previous generations and this is a direct result of their use of smartphones and social media. ‘Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls.’[1]
5. Injustice. We are aware for a long time that the electronic industry contains a lot of injustice. The mining of necessary minerals is full of underpaid and heavy work, often in dangerous conditions with few or no social security and sometimes even done by kids. The more we are enslaved to technology, the less free we are to make ethical decisions. Concrete: the more I am enslaved to my phone, the less I am willing to settle for the compromise of a FairPhone which has inferior hardware for more money.
6. Climate impact. The production of electronics and also the use of online technology (clous storage, AI, etc.) makes for giant use of energy and carbon emissions. And here again: the more enslaved I am to technology, the harder it is to make ethical choices.
7. Consumerism. And last but certainly not least: many of the apps we’re using, including our social media, are designed to “sell” our attention for commercial ends. In this “attention economy” our attention is bought by commercial parties wanting to sell us all kinds of things we don’t need. We are manipulated to long for things we don’t need have nonetheless a cost for our planet. As economist Paul Schenderling found out: There are currently 10 million modern slaves for our Dutch economy. By being on these platforms and “selling” our attention we contribute to the system of consumerist-capitalism that is destroying our planet.

The core: an age-old tactic of Satan

At the end of his book 12 ways your phone is changing you, Tony Reinke says maybe that at it’s core, what’s happening to us through our smartphones is part of an “age-old tactic of Satan”, as described by C.S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters. Lewis calls it the “Nothing strategy”.

“It is the strategy that eventually leaves a man at the end of his life looking back in lament: ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’” (191)

This “Nothing strategy” is “very strong”:

“strong enough o steal away a man’s best years, not in sweet sins, but in a dreary flickering of the mind of it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them (…) or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.” (Lewis, Screwtape letters , 60 geciteerd bij Reinke, 191)

We need to escape this nothing-strategy and get back to spending our time and attention on what we like and ought.

Three lessons I learned

In the course of a year of detoxing I learned a lot. I want to share three lessons.

1.      Ask the right question

From the start of the detox I had been asking myself these questions:

How do I want to use my phone? When am I satisfied?

For a few months rocked back and forth between reasonable content and discontent.

But slowly I began to realize that I was asking the wrong question. I came up with a far better question:

How can I be most useful for God? How can I become a “precious tool”, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4?

Not my own content of discontent should be leading. And I shouldn’t be aiming for a lifestyle that is ‘okayish’. There is way more to be striving for, way more God wants for our lives than being moderately satisfied. So I shifted towards asking what in light of Gods Kingdom would be the best way to live.

The more I asked this question, the more I leaned towards a radical change in the way I used my smartphone. More and more I realized that my smartphone was contributing to my effectiveness and efficiency, or even my “impact”, but not to my usefulness for God.

This same lens should be used for every technology, I think. We often approach technology through the lens of efficiency: does it help us achieve our (good) goals? If so, it’s good.

But what if we probed much deeper and asked, for every technology, what spirit is behind it? Who designed it and why? What is it’s aim? Who is it serving? How is it produced, and where and by whom and to what cost? To what extent does this reflect the values of Gods Kingdom?

As church, as Christians, we are, I think, called to critically assess every new technology with these kinds of questions. And we are to ask more than: are we satisfied with the way this technology helps me achieve my ‘christian’ goals? We should ask: how does this technology, with all it entails, fit in Gods design for the world, with Gods Kingdom?

2.      Do not lean on willpower

The second thing I discovered is that willpower can only bring you so far.

The first few months I tried to limit my smartphone use with all kinds of rules I layed upon myself.

• No smartphone on the toilet.
• No smartphone before 10 in the morning or after 8 in the evening.
• Only open WhatsApp when I have time to reply to messages.

Etc.

It worked for a few weeks and than I was back to where I started.

Because with these ‘rules’ I had to rely on my willpower every day.

In the long run, that doesn’t work.

So after a few months I realized: I need to make structural changes. I decided I had to leave WhatsApp completely, for that was the main trigger for me to take my smartphone many times a day. (I had already gotten rid of social media and news apps.) As long as I had WhatsApp I would always feel the urge to take out my phone and watch because someone might be waiting for my reply.

So I did, I left WhatsApp and lived happily ever after 😉.

To be honest, it’s not as simple as that. But I did take a few steps to structural change and these helped a lot:

• I left all social media that had a pull on me. I’m only on LinkedIn now and that is really only a tool to me.
• I removed all apps that make me pull out my phone involuntarily or make me stay on it longer than I wanted: Marktplaats, News apps, etc.
• I installed a new homescreen with just a black background and white letters to my four most important apps. No colors, no icons, no notifications.
• I switched off allmost all notifications (except for calendar, phone and sms).
• I left WhatsApp.

I still face all kinds of challenges in managing technology and also with my smartphone. But these structural decisions made a world of difference.

3.      Find help

The third thing I learned: we need each other. I would have never come this far without the support of my detox buddies. I wouldn’t even have started.

If we want change, we need each other.

We called each other for an hour every month. Just a simple phone call asking: how are you doing in your detox? What are your challenges? What are the joys? What’s up next?

This really, really helped.

So do not hesitate to contact fellow-students to start a detox together. It’s really worth it! And if you can find nobody, contact your local IFES student worker.