If you have an iPhone, try pushing its side button three times in a row. Just like magic, the screen should turn from color into black-and-white, or rather grayscale. (To do the same on an Android phone, you’ll have to dive into settings, then “accessibility,” “vision enhancements,” and “color correction.”) Why would you want that in the first place? As Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks explains in the Big Think video above, “one of the ways that you can actually get less hooked by social media, or any screen-based technology, is by turning off the color.” When you get only black, white, and the shades of gray in between, “you will care less about your screen, and you will look at it less.”
This may ring true to those of us who remember purely monochromatic cellphones, and how little time we spent staring at them. But no matter your generation, Brooks has plenty of useful advice about how to break the dependency on your phone from which, as a twenty-first-century internet user, you almost certainly suffer.
“You notice when somebody is addicted to heroin, because it’s not that common for ordinary people,” he says. “You don’t notice when somebody’s addicted to their phone, because literally everybody is addicted to their phones.” Therefore, we could all benefit from turning off notifications, setting defined “tech times,” exercising without our devices, and going on multi-day meditation retreats — though we may have to work up to that last one.
The functional phone addict may believe that all his daily scrolling may not have that much of a negative impact on his life, and even that it helps him unwind. What he doesn’t realize, in Brooks’ view, is the extent to which digital distractions keep him out of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.” (These comments come around the 27:06 mark.) Flow happens “when you’re involved immersively in something, and hours turn to minutes. You lose track of time. It’s intensely pleasurable,” almost “like a state of Buddhist meditation.” Consciously or unconsciously, we use our phones and other digital devices in a way that prevents flow, “multitasking” between numerous tasks and distractions, never paying sustained attention to any one thing. At the root of this impulse is a fear of boredom, which must be endured in order to accomplish anything meaningful. The irony of our newfound ability to evade boredom every moment is that, if we do so, the whole of life turns out to be pretty boring.
Related content:
How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes
The Surprising Power of Boredom: It Lets You Confront Big Questions & Give Life Meaning
How to Get into a Creative “Flow State”: A Short Masterclass
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
