Member-only story
Six Years With a Distraction-Free iPhone
(and how to try your own low-stress experiment)
In 2012, I realized I had a problem. My iPhone made me twitchy. It called to me from my pocket, the way the Ring called Bilbo Baggins.
My moment of clarity happened in my living room. I was sitting on the floor one evening, building train tracks with my kids, when my older son said:
He wasn’t trying to make me feel bad or anything. He was just curious. But I didn’t have a good answer. So why was I looking at my iPhone? I didn’t even remember taking it out — it had sort of materialized in my hand. All day, I’d been looking forward to spending time with my kids, and now that it was finally happening, I wasn’t really there at all.
I froze for a second. I thought back.
When the iPhone came out, in 2007, it was shiny and beautiful and cool and I flat-out wanted one. But I needed a justification, so I convinced myself that I needed it for work. After all, the iPhone…
