Angela Watson's Truth For Teachers

I picked up my phone to check the weather the other day, and twenty minutes later I was still standing in my kitchen, having bounced from app to app through a chain of perfectly legitimate tasks that I never actually chose to do in that moment. I wasn't scrolling mindlessly. I was checking my steps, signing up for a yoga class, responding to my husband's text, following up on a bank alert. And I still lost the thread of my own day. That's what makes our relationship with phones so hard to examine. It's not all mindless scrolling. Our phones are genuinely useful tools, and that's exactly why we never put them down. We've adapted so completely to being constantly tethered to our devices that we've forgotten what it feels like to have a mind that isn't always being filled with input. We reach for our phones in every spare moment, not because we need to, but because we have two minutes to kill and our brains have been trained to say "phone" before we've made a conscious decision. Something interesting has shifted