Don’t Be a Digiphrenic

You can refuse to fragment your attention and identity.

On a Sunday morning in mid-November, my kids and I walked along Queen Street in Toronto. We stopped in front of a fancy brunch restaurant, waiting for a pedestrian signal to change, when one of my sons pointed out a curious scene. Just inside the window, six well-dressed women sat around a table with coffee and food. Every single one of them was looking at their phone.

I watched them for a minute before my kids tugged at my arm and said, “Come on, let’s go.” But I haven’t forgotten those six women, together and yet alone. They were physically present but mentally elsewhere. There’s a chance they were all having a wonderful time, but I am not convinced. I walked away, haunted by that tiny snapshot of so much that is wrong with our society.

Instant Absence

Smartphones have enabled an unprecedented division of the self. Through these mini pocket portals, we can escape our physical surroundings and transport ourselves psychologically to different worlds. It is now possible to leave one’s body in a particular place, but exist for extended periods of time in another, whether through immersive video games, video streaming, chatting, or just scrolling. You can now live somewhere and never get to know it. It is astonishing.

Distraction has always existed, such as reading books or playing music, but these pastimes tend not to be as all-consuming as a smartphone. It takes more effort to get into a book’s storyline, and it is easier to break out of that zone when summoned back to reality. With smartphones, however, it’s easy to dip in and out; the content is so compelling and fast-paced that it can feel more desirable to look at a phone than the person sitting across from you.

We humans cannot be in two places at once. We might think we’re good at switching back and forth between virtuality and reality, but we delude ourselves. As Douglas Rushkoff wrote, “By dividing our attention between our digital extensions, we sacrifice our connection to the truer present in which we are living.” He coined a term, “digiphrenia”, to describe this tension between “the faux present of digital bombardment and the true now of a coherently living human.”

A Fake Self

The more we immerse ourselves in our phones, the more important our digital personas become to us—and this is where a further split occurs. Not only are we absent from the present moment, but we pour resources into developing the person we are online, this avatar who represents us and is wholly different from the person we are offline. The online self is usually curated to be maximally palatable to the broadest audience (unless your online shtick is to be disagreeable). Regardless, it’s a splitting of the self into an additional or even multiple identities.

It is normal to learn from a young age how to adapt ourselves to different social situations—for example, telling our parents edited versions of stories we tell our friends. But an online persona is different. It is a false self, an alternate, a performer, a projection of whom we’d like to be and how we want to be perceived. As Erin Loechner writes in The Opt-Out Family, the cultivation of an online presence places a disproportionate emphasis on identity. We are encouraged to “present [ourselves] publicly one way and privately another.”

The sad thing is that, as we try to become more dynamic, successful, and attractive online, we become flatter and more boring in real life. We risk becoming “pancake people.” This is because time and attention are limited resources, and the more we allocate toward our digital extensions, the less is left for our real selves, which thrive or wither in direct response to our efforts at self-improvement. We undergo a kind of transcendence that nobody should ever want. As Zadie Smith writes:

“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.”

Misplaced Priorities

I am bewildered by the ease with which we sacrifice in-person moments on the altar of the smartphone. We are shockingly willing to give up chunks of our precious, fleeting lives to capture, crop, filter, and post images online. Adults spend an average of 2 hours, 23 minutes per day on social media. That is time that could be spent making ourselves smarter, healthier, better rested, more knowledgeable, and more attractive in real life.

And yet, we treat the non-digital world merely as a source of raw material, a place where we gather content for use in the more real, more vital, digital space. Bo Burnham offered a satirical metaphor: “One should only engage with the outside world as one engages with a coal mine. Suit up, gather what is needed, and return to the surface.”

We do this for an audience of “friends” and “followers” that isn’t even real. These are not people whom we would call for help in a crisis. They would never knock on our doors with a hot meal and a warm hug. We do not know them, and they do not know us. But they enjoy our performance, and so we are happy to oblige, despite a staggering opportunity cost.

Surely, we are not meant to live like Rushkoff’s “digiphrenics”, split between worlds and identities. It is exhausting, shallow, lonely, and unsustainable—and I do believe it’s catching up with us.

Brain Rot

Just this week, Oxford University Press chose “brain rot” as its Word of the Year for 2024. Apparently, brain rot “gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media.” The term’s use went up by 230% this year. While it’s unfortunate that such a negative word (isn’t it two words?) defines our world, perhaps it is a good sign that we’re labelling a feeling that presumably no one enjoys.

We don’t have to keep doing this. The best cure for brain rot is to put down the device and return to reality. Real life is brain food. Focus on and invest in the people and world around you. Don’t be that person who pulls out their phone during brunch, even if everyone else is doing it. Stop referring to your phone to illustrate or verify points made in conversation; people would rather hear your original thoughts than watch a video you liked. As I once heard, strive to be interested and interesting.

Don’t settle for being a digiphrenic. It’s a compromised state, and there’s so much more to life than that. Reclaim your humanity, your sanity, your identity, and your happiness.

You Might Also Like:

• Consider the Washing Machine

• The Art of Family Dinner

• The Profound Pleasure of Physical Tasks

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In the News:

• My latest opinion piece for the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest newspaper, looked at the importance of childhood independence in light of Georgia mom Brittany Patterson’s appalling arrest. The same week that she was charged with reckless conduct because her 10-year-old walked alone to the store, I let my 9-year-old ride his bike alone to the store because independence is crucial.

• That story sparked curiosity from news outlets, including The Ben Mulroney Show. You can hear me channeling my inner Lenore Skenazy, starting around 28:03, in the episode for Tuesday, December 3, 2024.

• Did you see my latest piece for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel newsletter? Please check it out here: How Parents Can Fight Back Against the Digital Deluge of Life

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