You Believe That With Every App You Gain A Step Toward Freedom
Change of perspectives: here's how much your phone controls you
Hello out there - in a rushed world,
Here comes your weekly permission slip to Un-rush and Slow Down.
If you enjoy reading this post from my Newsletter Un-Rush, feel free to share it with your friends and click the❤️ button, so more people can discover it on Substack. Thank you!
IMPULSE
You Believe That With Every App You Gain A Step Toward Freedom
Change of perspectives: here's how much your phone controls you
There are thousands of mobile apps that make our lives easier, faster, and more bullet-proof. So we believe.
In reality, those mobile apps also became part of a control mechanism over our lives. Have you ever looked at it that way? In your mind, you feel like you gained more freedom, when in fact your phone gained more control over you.
Let’s shift perspectives on the glorious, smart apps and become aware of the other side of the freedom coin.
The outsourced world
There were 2.29 million apps and games on the Apple App Store in 2023. They became part of our daily lives and our lifestyles. And we call this LIFE? Smartphones and their apps offer you the opportunity to outsource everything in your life to the app world. Apps are developed to have an answer or solution (in the form of exchange, help, services, shortcuts) for you so you don’t have to use your brain, your hands, or the people around you.
We are now so used to living in an app-saturated world that we are losing our skills to think, navigate, calculate, orientate, or create on our own. As we scroll on our devices, many of us are lost and disengaged from the real world around us. When one-quarter of humanity actively uses Instagram every month and an average user spends 30 minutes daily on it, you get an idea of where we are with our heads.
The things we can outsource to an app these days would have been completely incomprehensible to our grandparents when they were growing up.
Here is how your phone and apps control you and do not free you:
Your phone tells you what to think
Your phone is so smart that it has so much information ready for you at your fingertips that you no longer need to think for yourself. Humans are lazy, and many like to follow a leader who decides for them. That makes life so much easier. So we are happy if some work is done for us. In the process, we don’t realize how our thinking gets manipulated. In the past, this was done the analog way. Today, the thing that tells you what to think sits right in your pocket.
Your phone keeps your conversations under control
When people leave their phone on the table while they’re having a conversation, the phone is in charge of the conversation. Studies have proved that just the fact that the phone is visible, unconsciously, makes the people anxious, nervous, not focused on the conversation and conversation partner.
Your phone enjoys interrupting your thinking
Your trying to figure something out, thinking your way through to a solution, you are concentrating, you have your creative juices flowing, you’re adding up the numbers – and the phone goes, “Hey there! I got something more interesting for you! Look at me! Play with me.” And your smart phone and smart apps manage to control how your flow of thinking goes.
Your phone schedules little blocks of time in your mind
If you see a notification popping up on your phone, what basically happens is that the phone is going to schedule you to have thoughts that maybe you didn't intend to have. If you swipe over that notification, it schedules you into spending a little bit of time getting sucked into something that possibly you didn't intend to get sucked into.
Your phone apps like to prevent you from thinking deeper
You can look up anything tangible and non-tangible that exists under this sun on your phone, equipped with endless apps.
This also means the phone becomes like a control room for businesses and their advertising to get into people’s minds. They schedule thoughts into the user’s minds, as Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology explains. Companies can precisely target a lie directly at the most susceptible people. We have our phones close to us all the time to connect, to be reachable, to find things, and to order stuff. This means THEY can reach us all the time, and because this is profitable for them, it's only going to get worse.
Your health app gives you orders on when to sleep and how long to run
Don’t try to listen to your body or decide when to go to bed or when and how long you want to go running. The mobile apps are all doing it for you. A friend who loves his health monitoring app was telling me last week that he went running and afterward felt as if his pulse was at 180. His watch with the health app told him it was way under 100. Technical issue? Body health issue? Do you believe what the app tells you, or do you listen to your body?
Your phone tells you where to go
It used to be normal that you could find your way by asking, looking, connecting the dots, and building a sense of direction and orientation. Google Maps killed these skills. I admit I wouldn’t know how to find my way around in the millions of tiny alleys in Venice, but I also need to get the head out of my map app in whatever city to better understand the layout of that city and find my way around without depending on the app.
A friend once opened his map app to show me where a restaurant is, and the app had a notification popping up telling him that he probably wanted to go to that bar he always goes to and that it would take him 10 minutes by car on this and that route. Look, he said, laughing; it is telling me where to go! It knows me! We were laughing. But think about it; that’s not really to laugh about.
Use the tech skills, but don’t lose the human skills
Let’s not kid ourselves; smartphones and many mobile apps are obviously a great invention and tremendously useful and helpful for our daily lives.
But you also want to be more aware of the other side of the coin, which we often don’t like to see. Those apps dictate our lives. A friend of mine just told me he loves all his mobile apps; he finally got them all sorted and organized and was wondering how he could live without them.
We can keep those helpful, making-life-easier mobile apps, but be aware that you don’t unlearn certain skills or your critical thinking skills just because you handed your life over to the little machine in your hand with hundreds of blinking and dinging mobile apps.
So we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable and that our minds can be programmed into having little thoughts we didn't choose. Being aware of that, you want to balance the fine line between taking advantage of the freedom many smart apps give you and the control many smart apps have over you.
One last thought: leaving your control center aside now and then will also help you reach a calmer, more generous, and more imaginative state of mind.
INSIGHTS
Curated stories on the topic of slowing down and living better – designed to open up new ways of looking at why you should give yourself permission to un-rush.
Paid subscribers (scroll down) have access to the links of these articles (or talks):
Sicily sells homes for One Euro.
How sitting still long enough helps you finding out what moves you most, or recalling where your truest happiness lies (a TED talk I could watch over and over again)
A book I just discovered on how to navigate modern media and staying sane in a world that does not turn off.
How and why a school (Waldorf) awakens children to their own individuality (why cannot every school be like this?)
11 interesting and helpful techniques for public speaking (by Polina Pompliano)
Working with one’s hands benefits a person’s mind and wellness
The dream of living differently and testing rural farm living in Portugal (by Leyla Kazim)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Un-Rush - The Power of Slow to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.