The Gun and the Smartphone: Some Thoughts on Mindfulness

Inc. recently featured something from Quora. The question was,”How does one overcome depression and anxiety?” The answer? Focus and don’t let your mind wander.

As I understand it, the main thrust of the answer is based on the results of a Harvard study published in 2010.* The abstract is a good summary.

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

The Inc. article also mentions the idea of “flow,” in the sense that when we focus on a task or action and sustain it, a sort of psychological motion or energy is created; in short, mindfulness.

“Mindfulness” is a term bandied about almost everywhere these days. There are even mobile apps for it, and it’s no wonder: mindfulness is seen as a panacea for much of the ills of the modern life. We are unhappy, overworked, anxious, and quietly desperate. As a countermeasure, we besiege ourselves with a galaxy of gadgets, quantifying our lives and rewarding (bombarding?) us with data and information even as they feed them simultaneously into the bigger galaxy of the internet of things. What we eat, how we sleep, our weight, height, age, gender, blood type, blood pressure, blood sugar level, what we read, what movies we like, how we spend our weekends. Data: the more you give, the better we’ll live.

On the other hand, a ton of articles (also found in the internet galaxy) tell us how technology is the culprit for our ills; chiefly our smartphones, and increasingly wearables (smartwatches, fitness trackers, and more recently, smart glasses). We should unplug, turn off our phones, tablets, and whatnots, make our children do the same, and we’d be free from the evils of modern life. Technology: the less we have, the better we’ll live.

The root of the problem begins to emerge. We are not happy, hence we isolate the factors and identify the problems. We use technology to collect data and information to address said problems. But even while some are solved, other persist, and worse: new ones emerge as a result of technology. And we are not happy. So we isolate the factors, find technology to be the cause of much of our current unhappiness, and we try to ditch as much as it as possible. And we are not happy.

And so it goes.

It’s unsurprising, therefore, to find many mindfulness apps on smartphones. In such a roundabout search for happiness and peace of mind, the smartphone can be seen as a source and destroyer of both.

In this way it recalls the American conundrum of the gun. A piece of technology designed for the sole, specific purpose of perpetrating violent death is also upheld as a fundamental source of peace and security.

When the gun and the smartphone are compared, a truth becomes clear. Take the NRA’s famous pat slogan — “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” — and apply it to the smartphone. We get something like: “Smartphones don’t make people unhappy, people make people unhappy.”

While the NRA’s pseudo-argument is at best specious and obfuscating — it does not address any of the issues surrounding gun violence and ownership — the same formula becomes more viable when applied to smartphones, albeit with a slight tweak: “Smartphones don’t make us unhappy. We make us unhappy.”

That still begs the question, though: can mindfulness — whether we strive for it via a mobile app or by shedding electronic paraphernalia — help to alleviate unhappiness? As in the case of gun violence and ownership, there are no easy answers, and there shouldn’t be. Nothing important in life — assuming happiness is important for all of us — should require only one-stop pat answers.

If anything, mindfulness offers at least the potential for a happier life that does not have any direct causal relationship to whether or not we have a smartphone or what apps we use. (Correlation is not the same thing.)

I, for one, like to allow my mind to roam. I’m a mental and verbal rambler. And the thought of keeping my thoughts constantly locked and loaded sounds … anxiety-inducing … and unhappy.

• M. A. Killingsworth & D. T. Gilbert, “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Science 330(6006), p. 932.