We hear a lot nowadays about the plight of teenagers locked in an abusive relationship with their phones. Brains frazzled, confidence shattered, adrift in a world of TikTok toxicity, these are obviously important issues.
But where is the public debate about another kind of phone addict, the post- menopausal Jewish woman? Where are hand-wringing politicians worrying about our fractured attention spans and our anguish when the Wordle of the day is not a real word (Pshaw! I hear you exclaim).
Why does no one care that we are constantly accused of ignoring our vulnerable children (aged 26 and 30) while WhatsApping friends about arthritis in our collective knees? Where is the concern that we are frittering away our meagre incomes on dietary supplements, waterproof sliders and cat food to treat kidney disease (to name my most recent purchases) mostly bought at 3am?
My day as a digital addict starts just after midnight when the New York Times app updates: Wordle, Connections and Strands must all be solved before I can sleep. Strands is a posh form of world search, while Connections is a sorting exercise which mostly tests your lateral thinking and knowledge of American sport and cultural references. Combined together – especially when you have spent an hour or so dozing on the sofa to put off actual bedtime and actual sleep – they form a powerful dementia test. Each day as I solve all three (yes, I do cheat sometimes), I reassure myself that the brain is in reasonable working order.
I then move on to the most important element of my addiction: Duolingo. The language teaching owl has been my constant tormentor, I mean friend, since the dark days of the pandemic when I innocently signed up to refresh my Dutch language skills. Since then I’ve studied French (boring), Latin (wild and fun), Welsh (entertaining but hard) and now Italian. For 2059 (at time of writing) days I have fed this addiction and nothing – not holidays, not work, not even bereavement – has broken my streak.
It’s now clear to my superstitious soul that if I actually forgot to do my Italian lesson one day, then the world would end. So I tick it off my list just after midnight, and then I can sleep easy – or not, as by this point the ageing brain cells have been stimulated so much that I lie awake, jittering like a toddler high on Maltesers.
During the daylight hours another app makes sure that I cling anxiously to my phone. Minutiae calls itself a global art project, followed by thousands of people around the world. It’s deceptively simple. At a random minute every day your phone will alert you to take a photo, which goes into a grid which gradually builds up into a picture of your everyday life. Very gradually – it takes four and a half years. This morning the app alert went off at the bus stop, last night, it pinged as I watched the news. Sometimes it announces itself with an SOS style noise. At least once this has happened in a work meeting, but funnily enough, everyone just assumed that I’d wrongly set my alarm (boomers, eh?) as I surreptitiously took their picture.
Mostly though, it appears silently. Which is why I spend a great deal of time just casually glancing down at the phone so I don’t miss my minute.
I know, I know. I even wrote a book for teens about digital detoxing called The Disconnect. Now I look back to when I managed without a phone at all – how? – and when my husband bought me my first Nokia and I hid it under the bed because I thought I’d be annoyed if he called me during the day with a list of boring admin jobs. How things change. Now I phone him during the day with a list of boring admin jobs.
The truth is that these addictions have got a lot worse since October 2023. They help me because there is so much to be fearful about. I would far prefer to be playing the New York Times puzzles than reading the work of its journalists. Give me funny cat videos to scroll on Instagram, not lies and propaganda. It’s so incredibly easy now to see really horrible things (often posted by allies, who want to alert the world to the horrors enacted on Jews, but end up re-traumatising me). And I can’t avoid it because it’s on the technology that I need to use – for work, for life, for everything. So I bulk up on ritualised anxiety blockers to distract, to calm, to stifle the anguish and worry that threatens to overwhelm.
There is much Jewish joy to be found on my phone, if I look for it (hello, Miami Boys’ Choir and the Platt Brothers). And there are the moments that my Minutiae app can’t catch, when I have to turn the mobile off – the black, blank squares on my grid of life. Sleep, swimming and shul account for many – and I’ve just joined a new shul, where the music is great, the people are lovely and I feel calmer and stronger as a result.
Can I break my addiction? I’ll let you know – after I’ve completed the latest Wordle and ordered some safety pins. And mastered Italian, ovviamente.
The Disconnect by Keren David is published by Barrington Stoke
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