I find that one way I get myself out of a writing slump is to write about my day-to-day fight with phone addiction. It’s been five months since I last wrote for CoverStory, and in the two times I emerged from a similar writing slump, I got myself out by writing about my phone addiction. In this third installment, I write about how “real” life has become and, with it, a different set of challenges versus my efforts to wean myself off my phone.
At a dinner party my wife and I hosted a few weeks ago, a friend mentioned reading somewhere that getting an alarm clock is one of the easier ways to lessen screen time. It was the first thing I mentioned in my first piece on phone addiction, and hearing it assured me that although our friend didn’t say she read it from me—and it’s entirely possible that she read it elsewhere—I was doing something good with writing about this seemingly minor thing. But I’ve also recently dropped the alarm clock because wakefulness is no longer a problem. My wife gave birth to our daughter last May. And anyone who’s ever been around a newborn would know how the days and nights and time itself become mere concepts in the first few weeks.
Life has become more real than real since then, but that didn’t mean that I’d be too occupied to look at and use my phone. My screen time shot up from an average of 1.5 hours to 3–4 hours per day, again. What hooked me: Instagram Reels on how to swaddle a baby, googling if this and that are normal for a newborn, entertaining dad-coded content, and writing a short essay on our daughter’s arrival (and the 900+ Facebook reactions and comments that followed, which I haven’t replied to—I’m sorry!). It became clear to me that in this territory I have yet to charter, the phone had arrived way earlier than I, and I had mindlessly traipsed into one of its traps.
I tried Brick-ing (a focus-building gadget/app I wrote about in my second article on this topic) my phone again, but it became too easy to un-Brick with the baby and her crying, her pooping, her cuteness (it’s a must to take pictures for the lolos and lolas!), and her awesome power to alter the entire trajectories of our lives, altogether becoming a motivation to go online, to google, to consult, to look for tips, to buy those tiny nifty things on Shopee, etc. etc. Of course, nine times out of ten, I would slip into the less helpful side of the internet and, before I knew it, I’d be doomscrolling.
It was in the throes of this doomscrolling that I was taken to introspecting about raising a child in a world that had ended many, many times over. In the past months that I hadn’t been writing, I was watching the world disintegrate further and further.
The news showed no landmark progress in the arrest of flood-control corruption culprits, no appearance by the Vice President in her own impeachment trial, the usual dilly-dallying by some hapless lawyers, and the nothings from Senators Padilla and Cayetanos. Places nationwide, Davao and Metro Manila in particular, were lathered in mud and drowned in floodwaters over the past months, while the usually calm and quiet Agusan del Sur went haywire over the preventable deaths of two bright and hopeful athletes. Aeta in Zambales were made powerless versus the local governments mounting a dumpsite out of their land, and farmers in Tarlac were made invisible and unheard in the talks on Pax Silica.
Too many smoke signals of worlds ending and lives never being the same again, yet in many ways, it’s the world staying the same and in decay. So, I had to wonder, how does one sincerely tell a child that there’s still a lot that can be done?
It’s strange that in all these events, many still found it in themselves to bestow much meaning in Pax Silica and the artificial intelligence that comes with it. In the face of so much trolling, dehumanizing, and lording over the lives of “small” people, so many become incensed or get erections at the thought of sets of code doing things for them, making sloppy videos and images, and of machines talking and acting human.
Most telling, for me, of the hopelessness that has descended is the rise in violence in schools. There are children resorting to brute force, to the mindless point-and-shoot of guns, because they feel that the complexity of learning, of performing long and winding inquiries, is no longer their lot in life but AI’s. What’s the point of schoolwork when AI can accomplish most of it in less than 5 minutes? What’s the point of grueling study when anything and everything can be AI-ed? Students these days find it hard to see the point and the hope in studying. And in this ironic railroading of AI into school curricula and AI’s subsequent bulldozing of schoolwork, I place the blame squarely on the gadgets so many of us feel so symbiotically glued to.
Thus, I beg (as an nth and what I hope to be a final simple tip against phone addiction): Put your phone where it’s supposed to be—in a corner of the house, and nowhere else. Like a telephone in the 1990s, the phone shouldn’t take any more space—physically, emotionally, mentally, etc.—than the corner it is “wired” to. I feel that, in an infinite number of ways, we have allowed the phone, our gadgets, these black mirrors, to invade so many aspects of our lives.
With this insight, I found my question about how to rear a child in this vale of tears answered. I look at our baby, and I see how she has yet to be recruited into the made-up world online. I see how so much of it is false and artificial, narratives rolled out by the powerful few and troll farms created to make us feel and act a certain way. I also see how I’m supposed to be here, where I am, sometimes carrying my baby, sometimes wiping her butt, sometimes acting out full-blown conversations with her, and sometimes singing her to sleep.
The University of the Philippines (UP) College of Law recently issued a memo barring the use of AI for their first-year subjects. UP Law said that while the move wouldn’t be enough to stop students from using AI outside the classroom, explicitly barring it inside the classroom should be a clear message on how it doesn’t really offer much help.
I was reminded of how physical learning was for me as a child. I carried so many things to and from school that my mother was wont to describe me as a “Christmas tree” with all the stuff hanging on arms and shoulders: my backpack loaded with books I needed and didn’t need; plastic bags or the free duffel and string bags that went with the bottles of Johnny Walker our uncle bought from Duty Free, containing my PE uniform, rubber shoes, and other items that didn’t fit my backpack; sometimes a cartolina case; sometimes a guitar; sometimes a science project.
It didn’t make me the best student. I wasn’t even a consistent honor student. But the stuff literally weighed on me, reminded me that I was a student and I was beholden to these things that I make and that make me, too. All these made me think about scrapping my use of Google Classroom for my classes this coming semester and going back to the good ol’ photocopy services at UP’s margins.
Lately, my screen time has been back down to an hour and a few minutes a day. My being an inveterate reader has, again, saved me, reminding me of and grounding me in the honest, true, and incoherent things that exist all at the same time. I am currently reading seven books: “The Idiot” by Elif Batuman while in the toilet and “Minima Moralia” by Theodore Adorno in even quieter times; a posthumous collection of David Graeber’s essays titled “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…” and his book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”; Alain de Botton’s “The Architecture of Happiness”; William J. Pomeroy’s “The Forest”; and (rereading) Glenn Diaz’s “Yñiga” in celebration of its recent publication in US and Australian markets.
I might just write about the beauty and joy in reading Pomeroy and Diaz at the same time. CS
