You Are Unhappy Because You Own a Cell Phone

I tested the theory and it’s surprisingly accurate

Let’s cut the bull$#!t, Millennials.

(And also Gen Alpha, Gen Z, Gen X, and women over sixty. Hi grandma!)

You’re unhappy because you’re addicted to your phone.

I don’t know anyone — anyone — who’s happier now that they’re hooked on screens versus their analog younger years.

Among my friends and acquaintances, there’s a one-to-one correlation between screen addiction and sadness/anger/anxiety/depression/loneliness.

One to one.

The more screens, the less happiness.

And it’s pretty obvious why:

Homo sapiens weren’t made for screens

Our bodies are designed for sunlight, outrageous amounts of varied movement, and 10–12 hours of sleep per night.

Instead, we sit in the same hunched position all day, staring at a tiny box of light, and eventually collapse too late, sleep too little, and wake too early, just to do it all over again.

No wonder life expectancy is dropping.

We literally weren’t designed to stare at a superstimulus digital lightbulb.

Phones are killing our sleep-wake cycles

The sun emits its most blue diodes at dawn.

That’s supposed to signal us to wake up.

So when our phones emit blue diodes late into the night, our brains literally have no idea what’s going on.

Phones are literally making us zombie-walk through life.

Phones make the competition pool far too big

For most of human history, we lived in communities of max 150 people.

Everyone got to be the best at something.

Growing up, we competed with the kids on the block, and then the kids in our class at school.

You didn’t need to be the funniest comedian in the world, just the funniest guy in your group of friends.

Now, we’re all competing with 7,901,597,747 others and we feel it.

• You’ll never be the prettiest because you’re competing with every girl on Instagram.
• You’ll never be the best communicator because you’re competing with 2,708,592 other podcasters.
• You’ll never be the best singer because you’re up against all of Youtube and Tiktok.

We chemically need to be at the top of a dominance hierarchy, however small it may be, just so we don’t hate ourselves at all times.

Remember: While you’re sleeping, there’s a kid in India who’s getting a Master’s degree in English and Economics…

Phones are packed with dehumanizing content

Instead of having sex with real people, now there’s a capitalist industry entirely devoted to dehumanized sex — pornography. (←SFW)

Phones turn three-dimensional biological species into two-dimensional renderings of people.

Our brains begin to categorize people as objects and products to be consumed instead of transcendent beings to be loved.

This is a problem.

Phones inject too much ambient anxiety

Futurist/pastor Mark Sayers says we’re all walking around with a “digital nervous system.”

He’s absolutely right.

And we’re clearly cranked up to eleven.

Do we really need to know that someone died on Alec Baldwin’s film set?

Or that it’s “eerily similar” to Brandon Lee’s death?

Or that there’s a hurricane in X, a tornado in Y, and a sharknado in Z?

(Obviously, we all need to know about that sharknado… but we don’t need a phone to learn about it.)

We’re “connected” but totally disconnected

The #1 thing correlated to human happiness is human togetherness.

Instead of sensing pupil dilation and having our breathing and heart rates auto-regulate to each other, we moderate our social lives with apps like Zoom and FaceTime.

Every second spent on a phone is one less second spent in reality.

Phones waste an outrageous amount of time

If the average American ditched just social media and Netflix, they could read an extra 600 books per year.

(For real. The math checks out.)

The average person is on their phone 1,971 hours per year.

That’s a full-time job.

For Gen Z it’s up to eight hours per day, and it’s going to be far worse for Gen Alpha.

If a sixteen-year-old ditched her phone (like one of my Sunday school kids just did) and lived to age eighty, they’d save 24 years of waking life.

Plus, people check their phones an average of 58 times per day.

Forget about Deep Work.

Phones make us feel too much

Squid Game is horrible.

Life doesn’t have that much violence.

Ditto House of Cards.

Life doesn’t have that much drama.

Keeping Up With the Karda$hians?

Life doesn’t have that much conflict.

Let’s not even talk about what social media, video games, and the news do.

We need to wean off our addiction to violence, drama, and conflict.

What goes in must come out.

Obviously, most of us aren’t going to go Rambo on a school, backstab our way to the presidency, or treat our family like garbage, but this stuff is rotting our souls.

It’s never occurred to most people that we’re not supposed to feel this much.

Phones make everyone boring

Do you really want to watch, read, listen, play, wear, travel, think, believe, speak, and act the same as everyone else?

Because that’s exactly what the commercial algorithms that rule the web are doing to us.

It’s a bit naive to say that a phone is “just” a tool.

Every technology has a slant.

Machine guns, for instance, kill more people than, say, pillows.

A phone’s primary commercial purpose is commercially-driven behavioral change.

Little nudges all day long. Push notifications, alerts, texts, emails, reminders, updates, little red bubbles, and tons and tons of ads, most of which you don’t even realize are ads.

Each one, changing your beliefs, patterns, and behaviors.

Making you a new person.

Their person.

Phones change our orientation

This is, by far, the most dangerous thing that phones do, and I haven’t even mentioned digital surveillance.

Phones re-orient our lives.

Rather than looking outward at others, we look inward at ourselves.

Phones teach us that we are the center of the universe.

Entertain me. Feed me. Comfort me. Excite me. Turn me on. Piss me off. Make me feel better about myself by attacking someone else.

No wonder social cohesion is disappearing. We’re all anti-socialists now.

There’s an easy way to fix the problem:

Just get rid of your smartphone.

It’s entirely possible, and you’ll be far happier for it.

I went #cellfree over ten years ago and don’t miss it whatsoever.

Since then, I’ve…

• Traveled to forty countries (including dangerous places like North Korea, Honduras, Transnistria, and east Montana.)
• Road-tripped through 45 American states, ten Canadian provinces, and dozens of British counties.
• Roasted marshmallows on flowing lava, outran a cyclone, swam up an underground river, ate bull’s testicles, and skinny-dipped in a glacial lake.
• Met interesting people like Pope Francis, Prince Charles, and Craig Groeschel, plus a whole bunch of mayors/senators/congresspeople/etc, and interviewed great thinkers like Ryan Holiday and Ben Hardy (plus a baroness in the House of Lords one time.)
• Written four books, directed three documentaries, published hundreds of articles, started two podcasts, and spoken in hundreds of cities all over the world.

Didn’t have a phone for any of it.

Not only do I not have a phone, but now that I have a brand new baby, I’m completely off screens except for work, and every minute offline has been an utter joy.

Happiness doesn’t happen overnight, but the best way to make your foot stop hurting is to yank the shard of glass out of your heel.

Get rid of your smartphone.

Take back your life.

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