Why Digital Detox Doesn’t Work
Being without a phone is a luxury these days. If you can handle it, you’re either on vacation or you have a staff to handle all of your digital work. For the rest of us, technology is both a distraction and a necessity. And digital detox has little to do with it.
What is the point of detox?
The original meaning of detox was that if there is literally a toxic substance in your body, you need to get rid of it. Our body does not accumulate a substance called “digital”, so this concept is inapplicable.
Digital detox is more like an emergency diet. You do not eat anything (or, for example, just juice) for a while in the hope that during this time you will lose weight. You may hope that you will quit the habit of eating high-calorie foods (or constantly checking your phone). But it’s really just a way to calm guilt before you go back to your old habits.
Detox is fun just because it’s a vacation.
There are two ways to go digital detox. One is simply to use your phone less while living a normal life, which is basically impossible because your normal life probably depends a lot on your phone.
If you are rich, you can detox by taking a digital detox vacation. If you don’t, you may still find that your regular vacation means that you aren’t using your phone (yell at that campsite in the mountains last year where my phone had no signal all weekend). And for the rest of us, there is always an option to stay: tell everyone we’re going offline, uninstall some apps, and try to keep ourselves busy in other ways. Invite people to play board games.
Whether you’ve had a lot of fun at the digital detox spa, or your weekend board games, you can come back with stories of how real and connected you felt , how much better you slept. News: You had fun because you were on vacation. You gave yourself a bunch of things to do that were more fun than flipping Twitter in the toilet. It is impossible to apply this in real life: you cannot get to Aruba in ten minutes while waiting for the bus. Your friends won’t come to the board game night every time you think you’re bored.
You can’t go back to life without a phone
While detoxifying with food / juice, the charm is that you will feel so great that you won’t even miss out on junk food; now that you’ve hit the reset button, you’ll eat cucumbers for breakfast every day for the rest of your life.
But there is no equal way to return from digital detoxification. You can turn off most notifications and get used to snoozing your phone more often, but that doesn’t mean you can actually live without your phone.
“But people are used to it!” say the skeptics. Although true. Are you going to buy folding roadmaps and only know if there are traffic jams if they are bad enough to be reported on the local news? Get a paper dictionary? Buy an encyclopedia from a traveling salesman? Save the next yellow pages dumped in your yard and hope the companies you might need are actually still paying to advertise on them? Give the nanny the number of the restaurant where you will be dating so they can ask the staff to send you a message in the event of an emergency? This is not a rational decision.
FOMO is a feature, not a bug
The worry we get from constantly checking / wanting to check our phone is FOMO (fear of missing out) which is built into the app and the phone itself. This is a design feature, not a flaw. There is no absolutely healthy and safe way to use your smartphone. They wouldn’t be so ubiquitous if we felt we could take them or leave them.
And so we are fascinated by the detox fantasy. When a big systemic problem arises, we start looking for individual solutions: I’ll take a break.
But detoxification doesn’t work because it’s an action that people take, and phone addiction is not an individual problem.
Instead, the best we can do is constantly negotiate with our devices and recognize the ways they try to shape our behavior. Facebook doesn’t want us to be able to check the location of the party we agreed to without showing us 10 more events and a hundred other snippets from the lives of our friends. Even while checking messages from a boss or coworker, you can’t do it without winking Slack at all those unread messages here .
This way we can tell our phones to block certain apps at certain times . We can limit the number of notifications and disable wake up . We can put our phones down during lunch or tell coworkers that we won’t answer messages after 5:00 pm. Setting all these small boundaries can be tedious, and no tech company has much of an incentive to make it easier, but we still have a few more options.
In a sense, this is an attempt to log out of Facebook and transfer all the emotional work to the wife . But during your digital detox, you won’t find anything that changes the fact that megacorporations are using your attention as fuel for shareholders. So detox if you want, but be honest with yourself if this is just a vacation.
Updated 3/14/2019 shortly after posting to add more suggestions on how to manage our relationship with our phones.