I know we read a lot about how kids are impacted by screens. I actually wrote something this week all about that too (you can read it here).
Anyway I want today to talk to you honestly about phone addiction. Phone addiction amongst women my age.
Phone addiction and me.
I remember what it was like not to have a phone. I remember being fucking bored. As a child I would record a radio show on my tape recorder whilst my cat (dressed in a dolls bonnet and booties) would watch. The cat was fucking bored too. In my teens I fantasised entire relationships with Robert Palmer (I know - an acquired taste), John Taylor, Terence Trent D’Arby, Michael Hutchence, and even Daryl Hall from ‘Hall & Oates’. These fantasies revolved around them seeing me from afar, admiring my giant bubble perm (which cost 6 months of working in a green grocers in Honor Oak Park) and then approaching me with the words - ‘Hey you look amazing. Do you want to live with me in LA/New York/Nice/DEFINITELY NOT SOUTH LONDON and we can smoke and drink Thunderbird red label?’
I’m going off topic, but it’s taken me 35 years to realise that no man is going to save me. I have to save myself. No one is coming.
I feel like a lot of 80s/ 90s kids felt (from MTV videos) that the purpose of being a woman was to be discovered by a rich, handsome man, and then perform as arm candy in return (see every rock/pop/music video from that period). I am thinking specifically of every Duran Duran video which featured a stunning model(s) and the band just staring at her in awe and then one of them getting off with her. Once you notice this in videos you’ll realise that it was all that actually happened and explains why so many Gen X women were indoctrinated with the idea that they were passive recipients of the male gaze and didn’t have much agency in their lives (unless they were supermodels and even then it was going to be a life of being stared at and having to perform for men).
Anyway phone addiction. I first noticed it was bad after my dad died in 2020. I’m not going to use any adjectives to describe that time. I’ve written about it before. It will never make any sense, no matter how much I write it out. The only thing I would say is that ‘dark’ isn’t enough. There needs to be a new word invented- everyone who loses someone they love feels the same (i.e. that language doesn’t actually describe the feelings).
It was Covid (so everyone was going through bad things), and I started walking around the house carrying my phone in the front pocket of my dungarees. This was a change in behaviour as before I had been happy enough to leave it on a surface and circle back to it. Instead I had it on me at all times. I looked at photographs of my dad. Listened to voicemails he’d left. Scrolled through texts. I Googled ‘aortic aneurysm survival rates,’ just to torture myself. I wasn’t seeing anyone apart from my 2 kids and partner. I retreated into my phone. I also started reaching out to people. I was continually on WhatsApp, DMs on IG, texts- I started getting this heady brew going of lots of channels. Developing friendships with people that I had never met. This has been positive (comfort, connection). It’s also however been negative. Negative in the sense that I have OCD, and cannot NOT reply to anyone (even people I don’t like or don’t know at all).
So if I open up lots of channels on my phone, then I spend time replying to all those channels. I do this rather than speaking to family. Instead of feeding the cat. Or tidying the bit behind the toilet that you would only see if you were lurched over the bowl and throwing up into it (maybe less important but you get the jist).
I prize myself on having an empty INBOX. So the minute a mail lands, I read it, I then put it into ‘work’ or ‘personal’ or I delete it. If it’s a personal then I reply right away.
Technology is a nightmare for me because it represents dozens of needy people asking me for my input. Reply reply reply. Nothing can wait because of the clean inbox thing. I also have a poor memory so if I don’t reply right away I forget. On social media if someone sends me a message then I have to like the message even if there are over 100 of these messages at a time (I have just recently stopped doing ALL of them because it was out of hand).
I noticed that now I was picking up my phone every 2 minutes. I would put it down, plug it in to charge, and then go over and pick it up to see if anyone had messaged. I also scrolled news feeds for the latest bad news on Covid. I then got anxious and so went on social media. Then more anxiety so back onto WhatsApp to message about the anxiety to a friend, then replying to the friend, then back onto news. This was the pattern.
And today this phone addiction continues. To be honest I have to say that it isn’t as bad as most peoples. I go on the tube and see people who don’t look up. They avoid all eye contact. They miss their stop because they are so absorbed in playing a game/texting/watching Tik Tok. I was on a train last week and a man my age (and I was travelling with my kids so it was pretty low) was watching cartoon porn on his phone. It took me a few seconds to realise that he was watching two nurses give a cartoon patient a blow job. He looked at me and still didn’t scroll to something else. I felt oddly numb. I don’t know why. I mean if he’d said something explicit, I would have immediately called him out, but instead I found the cartoon oddly intriguing. Was it a game? Was it role play? Was he the patient? Or was it an advert- one that pops up before the proper porn kicks off?
The phone sort of put me into a trance to the point that I didn’t realise that he was crossing a boundary.
There is something going on with phones that is downright weird. It is making us care less about people around us. So even though we feel like we are ‘connecting’ we are connecting less. An obvious point okay. It is also numbing us. It’s making us forget where we are. It’s robbing us of time. Mountains of the stuff.
I write a lot and when I say A LOT I don’t mean as much as someone who makes their sole income from writing, but it’s still a lot. If I didn’t pick up my phone…oh wait…just checking to see this video of a Llama dancing to Harry Styles. Oh wait…there’s this content creator, so so funny! Also triggering as she’s much funni…oh wait, here’s a dog that is just coming around from an operation and he’s making this weird noise…I mean…oh wait…a perfect shirt that is only…wait…I write…oh it’s reduced by 20% and there is the jumper that…wait I write…that Claudia wore but it’s too…I write…expensive and there’s two emails sitting there that need…a circular about AI and how it’s going to change everything…then need to delete…I write.
Too many thoughts whirling around. A lack of prioritisation. Low mood. Restlessness. The desire to fill the void. To not think about the skeletons underground or the crunch of their bones as they disappear with the worms. It’s too heavy. The llama. The fucking llama. Give it to me.
And the girl who made the radio show is buried deep inside. The cat with the bonnet long gone. Just bones under a tree.
‘Come back!’ the girl cries. She is looking down from her top bunk with the tape player balancing on one knee, ‘I love you.’
And you remember the time before this. The calm. The boredom. Also the fears and the terrors. The thinking. Somehow it felt more manageable. Nothing to look up. Nothing to check.
‘I never went away,’ the girl says holding out her arms, ‘Come join me. I’m still here!’