Another post about hating my phone? You bet!!

Plain English is, to me, the best podcast going right now. I don’t want to come off as a shill, and I don’t always agree with Derek, but the topics he’s covering and the way he does it are excellent.

The most recent episode talks about dopamine culture, and how it’s caused pop culture in the US to decline. The image below is an explanation of dopamine culture which I imagine everyone can recognize.

Unsurprisingly, the episode starts with the guest referencing how often we have the sequence of get bored -> instinctively check phone for a dopamine hit. The amount of times I reach for my phone with literally no idea what I’m about to open is staggering. Halfway through taking it out of my pocket I decide, oh yeah, I’ll check Instagram real quick.

And it’s not that the literal one minute or three minutes or even 10 minutes I spend on the phone is inherently bad. In fact, sometimes it’s actually good; maybe I message a friend about something, see a cool sports highlight, a find a clip from Arrested Development that’s hilarious. But I’ve realized today the opportunity cost of this habit is the killer.

I started a book a few weeks ago and banged out about 150 pages pretty quickly. In the last week I’ve read 0 pages. It’s not because I haven’t had the time. But it’s because my time has become so fragmented with these micro-distraction moments that I never actually say “Okay, I’m going to sit down for 20 minutes now and read“. The amount of times I’ve gotten into bed and told myself “I’m just going to check my phone real quick then read before falling asleep“, only to be on for 15 minutes and say “Eh, I’ll read tomorrow” is embarrassing.

That’s the dopamine culture discussed in the podcast. I shouldn’t even be embarrassed. My brain, and many others, have been hijacked. So today, naturally after listening to the episode, I’ve deleted Reddit, X, and Instagram off my phone.

Shocking, I’m probably the first person to ever do this. Within the first 10 minutes of doing so I’d already mindless reached for it. That’s a sign. It’s not that I can never go on social media, it’s that I can’t have them so instantly accessible. The instant access bleeds into my life and takes away from doing something productive. Instead, I’ll check on my laptop maybe once a day, or maybe once a week.

The few times I’ve done a ‘cleanse’ like this I’ve realized that after a few days, I’m not actually missing anything. Maybe this time won’t be a cleanse, but instead a revamping of how I consume social media and a way of finally ridding myself of the dopamine grip my phone has on me.