Checking your “likes” is the new smoking

Today, it is estimated that more than 5 billion people have mobile devices, and over half of these connections are smartphones, and these smartphones are becoming smarter every day (pew research, 2019). Being able to download a variety of apps that each serve a different purpose, people use their phone for almost anything and, therefore, the smartphone has been (and still is) a big contributor in the transition to a digitalized world, from offline to online.

Although it sounds like there is an app for just about everything available on our smartphones, there are downsides caused by excessive use of them. A research conducted by Deloitte (2017) in which more than 4000 British adults have been surveyed shows that 38% admitted to making excessive use of smartphones, while this percentage rose to more than 50% among 16-to-24-year-olds.

People seem to have made it a habit to constantly check their phones. Quite recently, when I entered a train, I was amazed by seeing everyone in the cabin having his or her face glued to a smartphone. Not only is it anti-social, but excessive use is also bad for your mental health and can lead to anxiety and depression. Several studies even show that high-frequency smartphone users tend to have a lower GPA, and lower satisfaction with life happiness relative to people who use their smartphone less often. Humans are just not wired to be constantly wired.

Being bored sometimes can actually be a good thing, these are the moments that you truly start thinking and when you can get creative. These are the moments when great ideas come. Spending time alone with your thoughts is really important, but for most people, something hard to accomplish regularly. In order to decrease the usage of specific apps or your smartphone in general, ask yourself: does it serve something I deeply value? And is this the best way to serve that value?

Imagine that Facebook starts charging you for its services per minute, how much time would you spend using it? Probably surprisingly little. That would already save you 20 minutes every time you would have visited Facebook, as this is the average time spent per Facebook visit (Zephoria, 2019). You don’t need to check your phone as often as you think, so devote your time wisely and spend it on valuable things.

In general, the apps themselves aren’t helping you, as they’re often precision-engineered to create and feed interaction neediness. The reason: critical use is a critical problem for the digital attention economy. The bottom-line of companies in this economy depends on the eyeball minutes on their service, which is why they try to make you use their services as often as possible. It is reported that mobile ad revenue was 88% of Facebook’s earnings in 2017; imagine how dependent they are on you spending time on their service.

While we all realize that smoking is bad for our physical health, why don’t we stop harming our mental health by wasting our valuable time checking our likes? New technologies should be regarded as tools that can be used to support things we deeply value rather than sources of value themselves.