Just leave your stupid smartphone at home. Your smartphone sucks, just ditch it. Just do it!

On the loss of the fourth place

I took our four kids to a nice playground the other day. There was one other parent there, a mom, whose daughter ran around and played with our kids a bit before they left. Nearly every time I glanced over at the other mom, sitting on a bench across the playground, she of course—as is usually the case—was on her smartphone: just looking at it, scrolling, looking, scrolling, always looking down, her head cranked at that eternal 60º angle we might think of as Smartphone Acute. I don’t think I can overstate just how sick of all this I really am—the reflexive, perpetual, neverending reversion to the smartphone, the chronic addiction that people seem to have over this device, the seemingly desperate need to always be on it, no matter what and no matter where, no matter the circumstances, always, just endlessly. This is just nauseating stuff. When will it end?

Christine Rosen writes that we have adopted the smartphone as an “indefatigable boredom-killing machine,” one that has effected a “near-total capture of our attention” and has consequently brought about “the death of daydreaming, and the end of a healthy sense of anticipation in our daily lives.” Rosen argues that smartphones have obliterated “interstitial time,” what Jon Haidt describes as “the many bits of time scattered throughout the day … [that] used to be given over to silent reflection or conversation with whoever is around.”

This is all true, though I myself describe the phenomenon not as “interstitial time” but rather as the “fourth place,” neither home, nor work, nor a community gathering space, but rather something in between or obliquely adjacent to all of those things: The waiting at a stoplight, say, or the milling about outside a coffee shop before it opens at 7:30 a.m., or sitting in the rickety old plastic chairs at a mechanic’s while you wait nine minutes for them to finish the spark plugs on your car, or reading a skillet recipe magazine at the drugstore when they tell you your scrip will be ready in four minutes…or even sitting on the bench at a playground, where you rest and relax for a moment while your kid gets some extra energy out and plays with other kids—maybe you watch your kid play, maybe you just think your own thoughts for a brief minute, either way it’s fine and good.

These were places that used to comprise a beguiling sort of localized downtime baked into the natural rhythm of things: You might pick up a magazine and look at something new, or watch an interesting local news report on the old CRT television bolted onto the wall, or read an interesting flier on a light post or storefront, or notice a pretty type of laurel bush planted in a median strip, or even just think some private thoughts for a few minutes. The smartphone has largely destroyed these things, this unique and idiosyncratic sort of public-yet-private commons we all used to enjoy. Data indicate that people spent about 4.5 hours per day on their smartphone. Look around you the next time you find yourself in a fourth place with other people: What are they doing? You can safely bet $50 that many if not most of them will probably be on their smartphones, doing the same thing they do every other time they come to a stop, anywhere and everywhere, for nearly a third of their waking hours.

You might be able to justify this habit if it improved our lives by some measurable degree. It does not. I do not think anyone can seriously argue at this point that the smartphone, as a nonessential and/or recreational device, is a net boon for any of us. Outside of some professional contexts and limited communications capabilities, it functions as nothing more than a time suck, a device to distract us from everything else. It is literally designed to do that, deliberately and purposefully. It is made specifically so you feel the compulsive need to pull it out and scroll through it every time you come to a resting place. Even in one of the most idyllic, fleeting, never-to-be-recaptured engagements a parent can enjoy—taking a child to a playground and watching her play for a few minutes—still the phone reigns supreme, forever snatching your attention away from people you love and toward a screen where you swipe your thumb endlessly, endlessly, forever, reading or looking at things that don’t matter for a purpose you can’t even articulate. Is this an improvement? Really? Is one’s life truly improved, measurably and meaningfully, by always being distracted by a little screen in one’s pocket, at the expense of, say, taking joy in watching your little child, who will one day grow up and never play on playgrounds again? “I really need this,” you think to yourself, swiping through yet another useless website, ignoring something fun and sweet your daughter is doing. “This is so much better than that,” you think, even subconsciously.

In our family we’ve worked to arrest this destructive cycle: We keep our phones away from ourselves whenever possible, and we will not let our children have smartphones, or anything resembling them, until they are 18 and they wish to buy and pay for them on their own. This makes our own lives better and will let our children grow up without arresting their own precious developments and enslaving them to this weird, toxic technology. We urge you to do the same! Alas, we are vanishing rarities: As Rosen notes, “nine out of ten Americans own a smartphone, and 95 percent of teenagers have access to one,” and the default seems to be to get on them whenever possible. What do you think the end result will be, with millions of children raised in a world without daydreaming and silent reflection, and millions more adults forgetting how to do those things? What will that look like in the end? Do you need to speculate that it will be very bad?