Electronic liberation

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A few years ago I wrote a piece called Phone-free Fridays in which I announced my plan to loosen my phone’s grip on me by attempting a kind of digital abstinence once a week. I wanted a more balanced existence where I could participate as an active element in my own life, rather than passively following the commands of the digital overlord in my pocket. In my utopic vision I would retrieve those hours stolen by the phone and use them for all kinds of good purposes.

Psychologists could probably point out all the constituent details that doomed my plan from the start. Whatever the reason, my resolve only lasted about two weeks. The attempt to employ willpower alone while making no concrete changes to my life was like a nicotine addict trying to quit smoking while holding a lit cigarette all day every day.

Several years have passed since I wrote that article, and in that time I have used my phone much more than I should have. But a few months ago I unintentionally came upon quite a simple solution which has helped me to achieve the very goal I missed last time.

During a class, some students mentioned that they spend up to five hours a day on one particular social media site. I felt a wave of pity mixed with disgust at the way they were spending the prime of their lives, probably reflecting and redirecting my feelings about my own phone use.

These young, healthy people, free from many of the cares and woes that will beset them on graduation, should be travelling and falling in love and going to the park and reading books and having their hearts broken. They should be studying, dreaming, trying new hobbies, or arguing about politics. Instead they are spending their precious few hours of youth gazing into phones and tablets, worshipping at the twin altars of vanity and jealousy.

This is probably an exaggeration, yet as I spoke to my students, I felt something like it – and with horror I felt too that my life was the same. True, I don’t use social media; for me, the Great Distraction is instead YouTube. It has so much good content, and in this sense it stands synecdochally for phone use in general.

For years, any moment I had a few free seconds or I was faced with a menial task, I opened YouTube. When I got home from work I would lie in bed exhausted and watch stupid videos. Over time the length and quality of the videos I watched gradually decreased as the algorithm slowly infantilised me. It got to the point where I didn’t even realise I was using YouTube. I just unconsciously opened it whenever there was a brief lull in my life.

Perhaps somewhere in this vast world there is a society of people with the willpower to purposefully select a single video, watch it, and then actually close YouTube and go about their day. But I am not a member of that superhuman tribe. If I watch one video, however short or targeted, I will not stop for a long time. It will spiral down and down and further down.

So after that conversation with my students, I tried in an impulsive fit of disgust to delete YouTube from my phone. Yet the tech companies are crafty: a warning appeared that some of my phone’s functionality would be reduced if I were to do so. I wavered, compromised. After all, I might legitimately need to watch videos sometime, right? Instead, I deleted the shortcut from my phone’s homescreen and hid the app itself in a subfolder of a subfolder. Now I can only access YouTube by intentionally searching for it through several layers of storage. Importantly, the muscle memory – ingrained in my thumbs by years of pressing the familiar button on my homescreen – has been erased.

Let’s not be overdramatic. That very simple step neither removed my flaws nor reformed my character, but it did reshape the localised, daily pattern of my life. And that in turn really has made a big difference in the way I live.

I can concentrate much better. The quality of my sleep has improved beyond anything I could have predicted. In fact I’ve been waking up before my alarm and feeling far more refreshed than I had for years. I’ve read more books in the first five months of 2025 than I did in the whole of 2024. My Korean language ability is no longer in such rapid retreat.

More than that, though less tangible: since the day of my Electronic Liberation, I’ve felt more peaceful. Looking back, I think the algorithm’s promotion of the most divisive and extreme content was affecting me in ways I didn’t realise. And I know I’m not the only one. In fact, if the reports are right, then even disgraced ex-presidents aren’t immune to the site’s allure.

I’m no psychologist, but I guess this has worked so much better than the Phone-free Friday plan because I took the simple, concrete step of hiding the app. I also had two immediate alternative uses of my time – watching long-form content on Netflix or reading books – to which I could turn instead of YouTube, because this is not about eliminating all forms of rest or relaxation. Consciously choosing to spend an hour watching a single episode of a drama is infinitely better than accidentally spending that same hour watching 60 one-minute videos, let alone 360 ten-second clips.

This was not an intentional plan of self-improvement, but it did transform my daily routine and by extension my life. I offer this article not as a smug self-help guru trying to sell a book, but as a phone addict who inadvertently stumbled on an escape from the labyrinth I thought I could never leave. I’ve been on the outside for two, maybe three months – and it’s great. Come and see.