RELIEVES ADDICTION –
Dec. 25, 2025 – The moment I switched, I no longer felt an urgent need to look at my iPhone — an urge that I hadn’t known was so strong until it was gone. I experienced a full- bodied sense of relief when the colors faded to gray. I would leave my phone in my room when I walked from my home office to the kitchen. I would forget to check it for hours instead of minutes. When I did check it, I put it down quickly as soon as the task was done. The number of hours I spent per day on the phone plummeted 40 percent, to an average of four hours and 40 minutes per day — still embarrassingly high, but not the vertiginous eight-plus hours I was averaging.
I am still not a subscriber to the current moral panic about phone dependency, an over-the-top overreaction that has led to ill-conceived laws banning phones in school, banning kids from social media, requiring website visitors to prove their age before accessing certain sites and even requiring scanning of text messages for illegal content. I believe those laws are largely just dangerous restrictions on our freedom of speech and freedom of association clad in child-safety garb. But my adventures in greyscale have led me to the unfortunate conclusion that my own phone usage was a bit more compulsive than I had realized — and that we could all use a little help fighting our compulsions.
