Too smart for your own good – the awkward axis of technology, profit, and mental health

Technology behaviours are the scourge of modern mental health. This is constantly underlined in my therapeutic experience. Smartphones have made addicts of everyone. From infants to pensioners, they challenge attention spans and control instinctive reactions. It’s arguably those without any such behaviours who might be considered unusual. There are numerous trials continuing in schools around banning or restricting smartphones. Research papers are stacking up and the impact on younger generations is perhaps the most publicly discussed. But it affects us all.

Profit Why is it so hard to detach? An uncomfortable truth is that phones are have huge commercial power. Where there is that power and potential for profit, pretty much anything goes. So you see such behaviours encouraged and normalised through advertising. Every vendor does it. Lots of phone companies, of course, the key intermediary. Observe the Three adverts around Channel4’s hit Friday night primetime show Gogglebox, presenting families on sofas glued to phones, not communicating with each other. Here, it’s totally normal and fine. It’s probably no surprise that the juggernaut film and television industry wants you to keep looking at screens forever. But even those selling mental health and wellness solutions are at it. The latest meditation apps and therapies also want you tapping and transfixed. They might want to make you feel better about yourself, but they definitely want your money too. We are all digits and datapoints. The notion seems almost fanciful that maybe all the answers do not lie exclusively within that magical glowing little rectangle. They simply must. This thing represents a whole universe of information, of opportunity, of connection with other people, of great deals you can’t miss. Productivity

Then there’s work. We are enslaved to the idea of productivity through phones. Of being busy because self-worth often rides on being busy and working hard. Employment demands it of people, home-working, the breaking down of boundaries, the idea of high performance through rapid reaction and response. There is huge value placed on being busy and working furiously hard right around the clock. It’s often how people feel ok with themselves. And that means refreshing inboxes and feeds and liking and swiping and scrolling and watching and reading and commenting and replying to messages that probably don’t really need replies, but what will they think if we don’t? Sure, they might be able to, but I just can’t put it away or leave it alone or switch it off. People need me. It never ends and I need to keep going. And what if mum calls and I don’t answer? She might worry.

Being bored

There’s also the idea of well-established comfort and discomfort with boredom. Phones and screens offer people comfort through entertainment, distraction. YouTube is 20 years old now. Young people have grown up with it always being there. Some of them watch it very late at night until they fall asleep. This doesn’t strike me as a healthy habit, but it offers comfort of a kind, a way of relaxing for some, through systematic stimulation and repetition. Gaming can also suck whole days from people. They offer a safe and controllable space.

A large part of this is because we have lost the ability to be bored, or even to just be. Thrust screens from a young age, some people have never had the chance to be bored, and the idea of boredom terrifies us. The idea of being detached from a screen while waiting for something like a train or a bus or a kid in a swimming lesson: it’s terrifying, anxiety-inducing. We have to sit with ourselves, being unproductive, and that can be deeply uncomfortable. There’s also FOMO, the fear of missing out and the anxiety that arises as a result. In truth there are many factors and there will of course be a spectrum on which we can place ourselves.

There is an aching vulnerability at individual, economic and societal levels. Consider those hugely important underwater cables so much global internet connectivity depends on. Consider how a flatlining British economy fares if an unfriendly nation gives one of those a snip. Consider an entire nation left without its comfort blankets, its ability to be productive, or feel as if it’s being productive.

Maybe, just maybe it's possible for a difficult conscious adjustment to be made, an awareness to be developed, a shift away, a pause or a step back. A reappraisal of values. Now, stop looking at a screen. Take a walk. Stare out of a window. Look at a squirrel. Don’t buy anything.