No one is free when society is mobile-dependent

Namely, we are addicted to your smartphone because society is set up for one to have one. This is a dependency in the same way that one relies on roads and public transport networks. The way one relies on resources that unlock the community for you. The dream of putting down your phone to buy an ice cream or go for a little walk reaches no further than the exit door you need an app to unlock. Like the parking ticket, the restaurant menu, the online banking and the bus ticket. This is how we take work, training, family commitments and friends with us, every little step of the journey. It makes everyone from the age of eight and up walk around with expensive (and happily smashed) phones.

One might think that one digital detox, or acquiring a Nokia, is an appropriate way to self-regulate their own needs. The problem is also not that life is impossible like that (although it is rather impractical). The problem is that everyone expects you to have a smartphone, and thus be accessible.

This means that the choice is not really up to you. The actual choice is located at the community level, and should be taken there. As an individual, you can only try to contain the unfortunate consequences that wash over you. But it is unreasonable that we as individuals should have to deal with it alone, when it was not our choice to implement the smartphone by default.

This is how we are caught in a difficult dilemma. We depend on the smartphone to access society, and in the same fling we access more than we asked for. It leaves us unable to create the necessary distance to have peace. We cannot solve this dependence with more self-control, rather it must be solved with better organization of society.

“Personal attempts at digital detox are doomed to failure”

Personal attempts at digital detox, or dabbling in a Nokia, are doomed to failure. It's also unfortunate if good mobile habits are to become yet another thing for the self-control to keep track of. We should rather ditch the guilty conscience over our own screen time, and think bigger. For although it may seem that way at times, technological development is not a force of nature. There are a number of choices that have been made that are why we have ended up here.

This is how we have dug ourselves so deep into a hole that we are now struggling to let capitalism dig us out of it. The market has failed us! We have to ask ourselves whether we are going to try to turn the ship around together.

There are some positives sides of the smartphone. It can be handy with Google Maps (although it can also be nice to ask a stranger the way), and it's nice to listen to podcasts while hiking. But in 2024, it should be possible to solve this in a better way. As of now, it seems that the smartphone is standing in the way of real innovation, and thus alternatives to today's smartphone. If you stopped taking it for granted that everything should be an app then you could probably think of many better solutions for bus tickets, remote controls, weather forecasts, parking machines, bank solutions and key cards.

The problem lies in the rampant incentive structures that come from everyone already having a smartphone each. With each new solution that is also added to the smartphone, we are more stuck in a slot that is not necessarily the optimal one, but that has many negative consequences for our well-being, and that steals attention, time and energy - and perhaps even happiness itself.

Some things in society You just have to accept it, even if you don't like it. Those who can must have a job, we must follow laws and rules, and pay attention to each other. We still have to ask ourselves the question of whether the smartphone is such a thing that we should demand of each other. The individual has to take responsibility for their own life, but when society requires you to have a smartphone it is strange to leave it to the individual to handle it. Therefore, we must let it be easier to make the choice to have, or not have, a smartphone.

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