Don’t outsource the job of managing your time and attention to Apple or Google
Hot on the heels of “smart email”, grumbled about in this column recently, comes “digital wellness”, the umbrella term for trying to fix our addiction to technology – and its grim effects on our health, productivity and politics – by means of that technology itself. One hugely popular app, Forest, displays a tree on your phone when you put it down, which then gradually begins to grow, only to die if you pick it back up. Android phones have Wind Down, which causes the screen to fade slowly to black and white as bedtime approaches; then, last month, Apple announced features designed to help you monitor, and limit, the time you spend staring open-mouthed into its range of glass rectangles. Using fire to fight fire in this fashion is an appealing thought. And given the endless data these firms collect about how we use their products, nobody could be better placed to help us use them more healthily, if they chose to.
And yet, increasingly, digital wellness triggers in me a response reminiscent of those screaming authoritarians you encounter in bad American reality TV shows, about wayward teenagers sent to the Colorado wilderness to learn self-discipline through self-love. If you hate how much you use your phone, just stop using your phone so much! Relying on Big Tech to help you do so is a problem, for one thing, because of the obvious conflict of interest. (However concerned for your wellbeing they might seem, Apple and Google need you to need their products.) But it’s also infantilising, as the author Cal Newport explained on his blog. “I’m a grown man,” he wrote. “If I’m checking my phone every five minutes, or playing video games instead of paying attention to my kids, I don’t need an animation of a dying tree to nudge me toward better habits. I need someone I respect to knock the stupid thing out of my hand and say, ‘Get your act together.’ ”
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