The one way to get rid of your phone addiction
“You, Me, Everybody !” Live the present moment
Maybe, there is this voice in your head that tells you that you are missing out on a lot that you could do by becoming more disciplined.
Maybe, you’ve had this feeling a couple of times when deep concentration transformed you into a machine, and that others noticed the results. You know that having these moments often would improve the dynamic around you and that new opportunities would show up to someone like that.
Maybe, you know you should wake up and get up, but you don’t, and you feel bad for it. You know you should do this thing, but it’s so easy to just enjoy that thing for just a bit. Then another bit. And then, nothing gets done. The time goes by, more and more things haven’t been done. Because you already missed so many things, so what real difference would it make ? You may think
While the gap in society has historically been caused by physical capacities, then noble birth and blood, and lastly accumulated resources. Society is now slowly but surely aligning itself with a two sided economy with consumers on one side and producers on the other. Are you a producer more than a consumer ?
Maybe, you want to avoid being a consumer always chasing this and that and understand real values when others will on their death bed.
Maybe you lost trust in yourself, then how would others respect you if you don’t respect yourself ? You want to be trusted, and respected.
Maybe it was when you were among those people, perhaps in special circumstances, on a trip or working together to achieve something or whatever. But you felt the difference when you were moving. Doing things. In the present, without projecting things in the future and thinking about the past. This is what it’s supposed to feel like, right ?
Maybe, you find yourself not complete without some sort of attention and you need that phone ding or that bzzz to make you feel good, loved, and whole. And then, after a little moment, you’re waiting for the next one.
Why ? That life we could have had ..
You might have experienced one or several of these impressions. The point is that without living in the present moment, we loose control of ourselves for moments that will not be given back to us. And we miss important things. Maybe that life we could have had.
It’s all about a dynamic. Either you go forward, one step at a time, and finding your way. Or you stay still, wasting one moment that will increase the probability of the next one to be wasted also.
Goals, targets, deadlines. They all have one thing in common. Once you reach them, another one comes along. Life isn’t about reaching those, but rather making the most of the journey towards it.
There will be times you wished wouldn’t have come, that you might qualify as for nothing. There will be people you wished you wouldn’t have come across, that might have brought unforgettable troubles. There will be mistakes that you will make, that might even not be your fault. None the less, all of that builds wisdom and appreciation of what’s important.
Living in the present comes with its colours and with its elevations. A much broader way of feeling and understanding what happens.
With going through difficult times, the superficial elements will have little taste. And, with enjoyable times comes along energy.
Little by little, walking through difficult and enjoyable times, you will find your space and your purpose.
A purpose worth sharing.
The problem
A known phenomenon in psychology is the Pavlov reflex. Habits are able to bind triggers with anticipation of a reward. A habit of ringing a bell before delivering food to a dog will make him anticipate the satisfaction of eating the food as soon as the bell rings.
In our body, satisfaction comes from several chemicals that are released through mechanisms in our brain. Dopamine is the most important one of this sensation of feeling good.
Our enemy ? The mobile phone. An infinite source of constant triggers that delivers an overdose of dopamine hits. Visual notifications, vibrations, sounds …
And everyday, it starts again as soon as you wake up, this very crucial moment when our brain falls back into this toxic spiral, thanks to the alarm clock of your phone (85% of people). To give you an idea of the addiction, on average, Americans check their phones 344 times per day. (That’s once every 4 minutes !)
Wait. Who am I ?
L a u r y
Alright, alright, that was kind of short.
My mother is French and I was born in Lille. People in this tiny north tip of France are called “Ch’ti” and are basically the nicest ! After that, I spent a bit of my scholar years in the borough of Manly in Sydney, where my father was born.
I had a great childhood, everyday going to sport (Judo, Triathlon, …) or music (Saxophone, bands, …) in a nearby village on my bicycle, and reading until late at night. Then “prépa” classes with Maths & Physics to prepare the national french engineering schools.
During my engineer years, I was also responsible for the Engineering department of the school’s company while also doing research in Nuclear Fusion. On the side, throughout the years, I completed projects as a Fullstack developer, then added Mobile development also, then Devops, and then Data Architect (pipelines, distributed systems…) & AI (Edge Machine Learning).
Freelancing as a CTO on demand, clients come to me with an idea and I :
1\ position the idea in the market and connect it to people / companies the need it
2\ build the MVP on my own (bare minimum version of the product)
3\ hire a team and let the project take off
At the beginning of my last Engineering school year, I dropped out. The reason ? Straightforward. There was always something else afterwards, another goal, too many interesting things to choose from that I could have done. I needed to live in the present moment, to find my space, to share a purpose for when I awake in the morning rather than going after a prestigious target.
Since then, I have led many projects, met people and lived adventures in different cities from Paris, London, … to Schenzen, Shanghaï, Beijing, …, but also away working in the lost grasslands of Vietnam, in remote undiscovered islands of Palawan, in the mesmerising desert of Rajasthan, …
For a little while, I have been in the process of delegating more and more over my freelancing projects and focusing more and more on research in a specific area between Embedded Systems and Rust in India.
And this is the project where I conjugate my Engineer and my CTO profiles.
My “Appel du 18 Juin” — Feel Free
For two decades now, smart phones have infiltrated their way in every aspects of our lives. Along with indisputable added value, came a devastating consequence : addiction.
The answer to that is obviously not to ban smart phones, or try to cut yourself from a society partly living in a virtual world.
The answer is to keep your phone downstairs. Smart phone is for work.
“ I, Laury Meredith, Lord Commander of the Present Moment, invite the Flutter, Django and Rust developers, from the territories of France, Australia, England, Switzerland, India, China, USA and beyond. I invite dreamers who still have not landed their dreams, guilty feeling ones that are held back and who would love to smash their phone in a quest to find their part, the discoverer guy and girl loving to meet different people and cultures. These are the ones who will make sense where there is none yet. Because everything is about dynamic. Authentic ones, meet me. ”
Just build it.
The tech world and the community of early adopters, bound together in their belief and in their need, will forever be the utmost engine of improvement in this world, completing each other as a team in the most honorable sports of all. Pushing the human race forward.
It is true. A large portion of us are hardly wired to the addiction issue we are addressing and it involves each year younger people. In addition to the challenging product’s adoption, this will involve learning about Rust but also about Embedded Systems and other technologies. It will not be easy. However, we shall not resign ourselves and abandon the idea of presenting ideas that could offer an alternative. A compromise that could allow the best of both worlds, that is with or without a smartphone.
Deep down, each of us know and recognise the problem even when denying it. Therefore, we will present a simple solution. We will build this something to decouple addiction from smart phones. We will link engineering and adopters through feedbacks and continuous progress. We will make available this way to Feel Free.
This project will enable countless lives to change and result in many added dynamics around the world. And let’s not forget that we are not alone. In every corner of the world, people like us wish a more authentic life. In time, they will join and help us in our common cause.
We will have provided a path for people to awake.
Action !
Some of you already expressed their desire by message to interact with the project, and others also helped in making decisions about how to begin and handle the operations.
I am formalising a small group of people who will be randomly picked with a probability in function of a number of points to win.
Tag contacts you think are interested in learning Rust, learning Embedded Systems, or who could be interested in our mission.
Each tag should be in a separate comment, and gives you 1 point if the person connects with me on LinkedIn.
Sharing my post of this article on Linkedin multiplies your points by 5.
Winners will become a member. Join the mob ! You will then be able to follow the project closely and know about what’s happening step by step.
Our mission : Awake
I would like to thank a few people who helped kickstart this journey.
I have to start with each of you who helped me kickstart technically the project. Juanmi Taboada, Yohan Boogaert, Felix Manuel Figueroa, Tue Henriksen, Vladislav Cebotari, Anand Gedam, David Kleingeld, Rafael Bachmann and Jeremy Lempereur the first one I reached out in a tiny restaurant of old Lille. Thank you.
The enthusiasm of some of you about the project has to be thanked also, because it really helps : Harsh Kumar Moroliya, Shoeb Siddiqui, Rohan Jain, Vaibhav Garg, Rinaldo Moreira Magalhães, Sachin Malik, Ankur Gangwar, Sai Praveen Reddy Allam, Utkarsh Gupta, Stephen Barker, Kaushik Choudhury, Vijayendra Gaur.
I will also be thanking Gael Kengmenni, Nishikant Kumar and James W. Holman for reviewing this article.
And finally, I would like to deeply thank students from IIT Delhi who have welcomed with open arms and hearts. I present to you Paras Gupta, Ravindar Singh Rathaur, Unnati Goyal, Sharankumar Shastri, Dnyaneshwar More, Rishab Kotni, Deepanshu Rohilla and Abhinav Upadhyay. I wish anyone to be surrounded with such people.
Instagram : @laurymeredith
