“It was a truth universally acknowledged,” I read quietly in my head, a cup of chamomile tea on my nightstand. I read the sentence again and again, trying to glimpse some sort of comprehension but the words rioted like mutineering pirates. Every few seconds my fragile attention was shattered by the relentless ding of my phone. Likes, comments, group text messages: all splashed into my mind like cannon balls.
Like most, I’m endlessly enthralled by the hypnotic blue light of my phone. Every buzz of a text, every ping of a notification promises a sudden surge of serotonin. Why summon all my cognitive powers to decipher a line of Jane Austen when I can just scroll my feed and shoot up an intoxicating dose of feel-good hormones?
Since I downloaded TikTok 6 years ago, I’ve noticed it’s far harder to concentrate. I used to be able to read a 19th century novel with intense focus—now I can’t help checking my email or opening a social media app every 2.5 seconds. As Eloise Grills writes in one of this week’s essays, “watching something more than 5 minutes started to feel like trying to read War & Peace.”
Apps like TikTok are shiny, overstimulating slot machines. Like the quintessential symbol of Sin City, social media operates by intermittent reinforcement: its sheer unpredictability (what will one swipe of my finger reveal next? a hilarious cat video? a Sephora haul? a deep dive on Jeffery Epstein?) triggers our pleasure centers, encouraging users to endlessly scroll for the next jackpot of dopamine.
Social media companies don’t consider the ethics of engineering something as addictive as cocaine—all they care about is profit. They exploit our brain chemistry for engagement. The more we scroll = the more dollars line their pockets.
We swipe with the desperation of a heroin addict chasing the thrill of their first high. After the next video—we believe—we’ll finally be satisfied.
Instead, after hours of the blinking neon lights and the spinning sounds of our FYP, we’re only left with a dopamine hang over and a dispiriting sense that the real 3 dimensional world is a lot less interesting.
Throughout time, new technologies have been met with skepticism, if not outright moral panic: in the 1950s, it was TV; in the 1990s, it was video games.
Today smart phones are a scapegoat for nearly every social malady: the dissemination of dangerous propaganda and extreme political polarization; declining social skills and diminished attention spans; unprecedented anxiety and depression rates.
But is all the doomsday rhetoric overblown or are smartphones really a threat to humanity?
Read this week’s curation and judge for yourself.
- “I Don’t Want to Die with a Smartphone in my Hand,” Eloise Grills, Kill Your Darlings
As a millennial like myself, Grills wistfully remembers her smartphone-free childhood. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the internet was a faraway place you visited—not a place you lived.
We had cybersex with strangers in chat rooms and coded our MySpace pages but we still drank Steel Reserve 211 in parks, rode bikes under spring skies, touched grass. There were quite literal barriers to voyaging on the sea of the world wide web: dial up internet meant you couldn’t use the landline if you were writing an angsty AIM away message.
But in 2026, there are no such limits.
In this poetically-rendered personal essay, Grills traces her desperate attempts to break her smartphone addiction.
Despite tying herself to the mast of app blockers and screen time limits, she can’t escape the seductive siren call of the mini computer in her pocket.
Her solution?
To opt for an Opel TouchFlip, a “dumb phone” with limited internet function. Though she could do more practical things like use maps and download music, she could no longer mindlessly open apps like a “rat in a lab, tapping the button for pellets.”
What happens when she ventures off into the lost territory of no-phone land?
For the first time since her screen-free childhood, she sits in silence without stimulation. Engaged with life, she no longer reaches for empty-headed distractions out of habit.
By interweaving literature, pop culture and personal experience, Grills demonstrates the forgotten glory of a life of alertness and aliveness, of consciousness rather than consumption.
This impassioned essay made me contemplate my own smartphone addiction. If you’re thinking of going analog, this is essential reading.
2. “What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away,” Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
In 2026, over 50% of Americans want to cut down their smart phone use. The idea of “going analog” is, ironically, trending on TikTok. In the digital sphere, there’s a wistful yearning for the material world: the singular satisfaction of scribbling ink on a page; the unparalleled pleasure of having a physical photo album; the giddy joy of receiving a real life magazine in the mail. Offline, things feel more solid, less ephemeral.
But though we long to resurrect the pre-internet age, most of us still struggle to escape the grip of our smartphones.
In this incisively observed essay, Jia Tolentino examines why it’s so hard to resist the pull of the pixelated world. We can’t cut down on our screen time not because we’re weak-willed but because social media companies have a corporate interest in keeping us chained to our smartphones. The more we scroll on Facebook and Instagram, the more money these corporations can make selling our data to advertisers (or even political consulting firms who target us with personalized propaganda).
These platforms are deliberately designed to be addictive. As Tolentino writes, they “encourage compulsive use by offering forms of social approval—likes on Facebook and Instagram, retweets on Twitter—that are intermittent and unpredictable.”
Social media hijacks our biological desire for belonging. On the African savanna, our ancestors needed membership in a group to survive—to be cast out was to be condemned to die. In today’s virtual reality, a like or repost is an analogue of tribal belonging.
Our minds have been colonized by Big Tech. Social media apps have exploited our psychological vulnerabilities, demolishing our attention span, stripping our ability to sit in silence, mining our minds for profit, polluting our mental landscape.
Quitting social media, therefore, is more complicated than simply doing a digital sabbath or downloading app blockers—we need to entirely rethink our relationship to technology.
According to MIT-trained computer science professor Cal Newport, “willpower, tips, and vague resolutions are not sufficient by themselves to tame the ability of new technologies to invade your cognitive landscape.” Rather than squander hours in the mind-numbing vortex of the infinite scroll—what he terms “low quality” leisure activities—we should start a book club, enroll in a German class or learn to build something every week.
While Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing, agrees we should stop scrolling, she questions the very notion of “productivity.” Life is about presence in the physical world, about caring for ourselves and our communities—we’re not mini corporations meant to commodify our every moment; we’re not mindless machines.
Tolentino stops short of offering a tidy solution, suggesting instead that we consciously choose how we engage with technology. Otherwise, we might join the living dead and become screen zombies.
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