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Welcome welcome, this is the fourth piece in a series about revamping our relationship with our phones and The Pull. The priors: Making It Your Own With Your Phone, Your Intent v. Your Phone's Intent, and Intermittent Fasting, Digital Edition​

The trajectory continues...

TL;DR- don't just digital fast and ponder your digital life, check in around your digital fasting and digital life, repeatedly. Presence Maximalism is a journey.

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Self Inquiry and Smart Phone Diagnostics

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Just one in twenty people attempting throttling actually throttle their phone use effectively. Gray scale and blocking apps don't cut it. They make marginal improvements at best.

One-off intense intervention may be too much. For example, people do thirty day digital detoxes, going right back to their old ways after the detox.

For an effective transition, I haven't found a single thing that works by itself, but have noticed trends:

• Hard forks rarely work. If you go for a hard fork, like buying a dumb phone with no intent of turning back, don't beat yourself up if you relapse or cave.
• Use inquiry.
• Use it repeatedly over a period of days, weeks, months- the you after a weekend digital detox is not the you before. The you after four hours less screen time per day relative to last week is a different you. The you a month after switching to a dumb phone is not the you the month before.
• This inquiry allows you to create a bespoke recipe to reclaim your life.
• "Success" often is unique even if failure is uniform.

For example, leaving my phone at home for three days in a row, I wrote two thousand words each day. Even weirder, it didn't feel hard. This gifted me the activation energy to go deeper in the inquiry process.

Repeatedly checking your process and life with less screen time leads to potentially unimaginable results. Mehret Biruk went completely offline after 7 years. She seems happy. August Lamm got rid of her computer. YouTuber Andrew Feinstein went from the bottom one percent of cognitive functioning to over the 90th percentile with a month off his phone.

Still, few people remain aware of such evidence. Rare are the videos showing life without a phone. Rarer still are the ones with six months off, or two years off.

People who are offline or strategically use the web aren't chronically online. Connecting with them in that medium tends to be limited. Fish where the fish are. Don't assume they aren't happy and thriving because they aren't broadcasting to the whole world how happy and thriving they are.

Truly happy people feel no obligation to broadcast their happiness. It radiates, and you feel it in their presence without hints of justification.

Switching from comparing to others to see how I'm feeling, to checking in with self to see how I'm feeling becomes the new default.

Self inquiry is rare. They don't teach it in school. Let's practice together in the context of smartphones and The Pull.

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Self-Inquiry For Self-Realization

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Inquiry tends to fall in buckets and contain lists:

• Hardware- the devices. What am I using?
• Software- the stuff on the devices. What apps am I using?
• Usage and relationship between the two- triggers, what causes you to pick up the thing, patterns around usage. How am I using these things?
• Constructing the new you- how will you replace your old habits, what superpowers will you unlock. What is life like without these things?

With these inquiries, mind your framing. As the famous AA saying goes, alcohol isn't the problem. Its the solution, a response to the problem. The booze works as a tool to cover up a wound, providing a temporary relief or distraction. Something lies under that. Phones and how we use them provide a constant distraction from being-ness.

This leads to challenges with focus and presence. Presence acts qualitatively across all of life. Normal focus now feels like intense focus. Supernormal stimulus is now daily stimulus. What once seemed insane- staring at a screen many hours a day, has become a widespread social norm.

If you're sick you're normal, because the norm is sickness. Don't beat yourself up about it, either. Its not your fault, but is your responsibility.

More important than any one technique is the culmination of shots on goal. Ladies may resonate more with Ashton Womack's tips rather than Andrew Folts's. Keep digging. There's hope.

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Favorite Inquiry Techniques:

• August Lamm's assessment worksheets- largely time based, emphasizing how you'll use the new time.
• ​AIR method- acknowledging, framing, and identifying the problem. Many people don't view their situation as a problem, and what they've lost didn't get lost over night, but gradually. The "what are you missing" framework isn't great for realizing you've slowly created ADD for yourself by unconsciously choosing to pick up an object hundreds of times per day.
• Jose Briones's course- comprehensive and limited. Inventory all your apps. Pare it down to 30. Plan out a time boxed week in your life. After the week, reflect and reassess. Realign your digital life with vision for the future. Schedule periodic checking proactively rather than reactively to reassess.

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Favorite Inquiry Questions:

• What are my chances of using this responsibly? App limits and grayscale tend to not work. I have yet to find a single use case that was anywhere near the success of switching devices combined with long term inquiry.
• What do I want to do with my time?
• Who do I want to spend my time with?
• When am I making this change?
• How can I redefine what it means to be me?
• What hobbies do I want to pick? Consider creative, physical, mind-based, and relaxing hobbies. You don't have to get so granular. Seeding future you with reliable sources of enjoyment outside of your device will go a long way.
• Does this make me feel more connected or more empty?
• What am I most susceptible to when I open up my phone?
• What emotions am I feeling when I open it up? Boredom? Stress? Am I even aware of this at all?
• Why am I doing this?
• What parts of myself am I reclaiming?

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Less Useful Questions:

These questions reinforce justification, weaseling, avoiding what's real. All of them produce yes-no polarities to nuanced situations that function more like trade offs.

• Do I need this app? What does need even mean? Jose reframes with, "will I get fired if I stop using this app?"
• Is this convenient?
• Is this useful? What does useful mean?

Plenty of individual apps have real utility. Quitting gains tend to be broader-- generalized decrease in anxiety, increased ability to focus, greater self-esteem. If you get rid of your banking apps, yes, you may need to make more trips to the bank. But, because you'll have deeper calm, peace, and focus, a trip to the bank will be less daunting than manically staring at your phone every ten seconds while waiting for the teller. The entire concept of "convenience" shifts. If perceived convenience comes at the expense of self-esteem and anxiety, is it really convenient at all?

A growing amount of data correlates smartphone use and cognitive decline including- lowered self-esteem, increased incidence and severity of mental health issues and addictions, slowed learning and acquisition, increased risk of premature cognitive decline.

People who took multi-month breaks, transitioned to dumb phones, then returned back to heavily reduced smart phones report compulsively picking up the object dozens of times a day after a few days back with it. On a work trip with his reduced smart phone a youtuber kept checking the time, checking "productive" and "harmless" things, noticing creeping thoughts like, "where's my phone" and pawing around to confirm its location.

These stories abound. No need to feel embarrassed when you have them too. Merchants don't frame trades like this. All the marketing talks about upside. Yet the data shows heavy downside.

Become conscious. Give yourself informed consent. Let's rise together.

Stay tuned for more. I'm pumped to share with you, and look forward to hearing from you too :)

Peace,
Drew

PS- I'm waiting on a GPS and a Jitterbug Flip2 to replace my iPhone 13 Pro Max. Mini notebooks have also been a handy replacement in some contexts. Remember those vestigial grocery lists?