Turns out we’re all Howard Hughes now

When it comes to our phones, we’ve officially gone OCD crazy

Number of times I checked my phone today: 136

Number of times I thought about checking my phone today: 1,762,874,029+

I think about checking my phone when I’m out to dinner with my husband. I think about checking my phone when I’m in important meetings at work. I think about checking my phone while I’m playing with my kid, and if he gets up for 10 seconds to go get a toy from his room, I joyfully reach for my phone.

I even think about checking my phone while I’m checking my phone — flipping back and forth between apps just to see what emails came in while I was on Facebook, or who’s recommended what right here on Medium while I was busy checking @s on Twitter.

And oh hey…while I was typing these very words, I stopped to check my phone!

The new world disorder

According to that good old dot-gov the National Institute of Mental Health, “people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) feel the need to check things repeatedly, or have certain thoughts or perform routines and rituals over and over. The thoughts and rituals associated with OCD cause distress and get in the way of daily life.”

Huh. That kind of sounds like…me? And really, that kind of sounds like everyone these-a-days. The average American now checks their phones 46 times a day. That’s up an insane 39% from 2014, back when we only checked our phone a quaint 33 times daily.

I remember when I first read Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood by the lovely Jenny Traig, I was profoundly wowed by how tough a life with OCD can be. But somehow/somewhy/somewhen that very same circular check-check-check behavior that I marveled over back then has since become our norm.

And the speed that things have changed is hugely disconcerting. Just 5 years ago, it was considered ultra rude to take your phone out at dinner. Now we all do it. When you ride BART, 99% of the faces you see all glow phone-blue, their necks folded over in that terrible spine-screwing hump. We use our phones to fill every second of downtime. I’ll even pull out my phone for the 15 seconds it takes for the crosswalk guy to turn from red to white.

This constant all-consuming checking, it does not feel good. Noooo. It’s like how I imagine a drug addict feels. I’ll recognize that my checking-out is not good for me or my family, and I’ll make earnest efforts to stop. My husband and I will set aside times where we don’t touch our phones, or we’ll put them in the other room while our kid’s awake. But then I’ll have a work emergency, or I’ll be couch-ridden with the flu, and either the urgency or the boredom of the moment becomes my excuse to fall off the wagon. And suddenly there I am, sneaking away from my kid to go check my phone in the bathroom.

Then time some well-meaning monster person will run into me and my cute kid somewhere and tsk me about how “it all goes so fast,” and I feel extra spiral sad queasy. I’M MISSING IT! All the real, good parts of my life are windsprinting by while I’m otherwise occupied checking—like a lab rhesus monkey self-administering cocaine—to see if people I don’t remember from high school have liked a dumb photo I’m tagged in!

For someone so driven by fear of regret like me, this is not a good place to be in.

And so: A radical proposal!

I know some people have had success with timed safes, which let you lock your computer and phone away from yourself for given timeframes. Or apps like Checky, which at least make you aware of just how many times a day you’re falling back into the tarpit.

But this problem needs a much more drastic solution.

I’m thinking we only allow the checking of phones and computers for 2 hours each day: 7–8am and 7–8pm Greenwich Mean Time.

The other 22 hours a day, we shut down the internet! So we all get all our checking craziness out of the way, then we settle in for 11 straight hours of thoughtfully productive flow time. And because no one else is online, either, that whole “you must be available 24 hours a day to immediately answer my email nownownow sellsellsell” insanity goes away, too. They’ll just have to wait until the next checkblock before they hear back from you, too. You, me…we all get to check ourselves before we wreck ourselves. Until then, everyone gets an away message:

I’m sorry I‘m not here to take take your electronic stimulant right now. But if you leave your email, text, comment, follow, like or recommend at the beep, I’ll return it just as soon as I can. In the meantime, I’ll be trading obscene fart noises with my kid, or making eye contact with my husband, or just walking around in the sun, looking up at the trees, letting my thoughts gently free-associate. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.