"36 For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
37 Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
Mark 8
Dreaming of the Algo
"Ranking world leaders: I'm putting Stalin in S tier, because he gets the job the done. Oh, by the way, I'm ranking them by how well they would do in a basketball match."
- YouTube Short
The above quote is the phrase repeated at 7pm as a young boy had fallen asleep on a couch with a YouTube short looping on his laptop speakers.
DETOX UPDATE (week 1)
Why have I started a smartphone detox? Review the images below.
Exhibit 1: March 16 - March 22 Weekly Report. I believe this report is extremely misrepresenting my actual phone usage as it is reporting daily average screen time, which does not include the many hours of Spotify background usage. Also, for context, I use Chrome for social media because I do not have the apps downloaded.
Opening Statement
For the last three weeks, I have pursued a large home renovation/organization project for my parents. Many parts of the project included hours of monotonous physical labor. This type of project is very difficult to begin, and in more abstract terms, the level of energy required to spark action is very high. However, I had an enzyme to start the reaction: a Bluetooth speaker. I love listening to music and podcasts, so telling myself I could do that while working helped get me started. I found working in the garage much more fun this way. After a few hours of work, I realized that mindless physical labor was only a small portion of the work required for the project. The project was very complex with thousands of components and required thoughtful planning, an executable strategy, and high attention to detail. These are things that require 100% focus to be done well. In other words, they required active attention from my mind-- or do they not? That is part of what I'm going to explore today, along with documenting many of my own struggles and my family's struggles with our, soon to be, infinite access to media.
Man versus Machine at 7am
It's 7am and a young girl is yelling at an Alexa speaker in her room to "shut up" in order to turn off the morning alarm. Thirty minutes later, a morning alarm goes off in her brother's room too.
He repeats "Alexa, Alexa", but to his digital alarm clock that isn't listening. He tells Alexa to "Turn off all alarms" and she responds, "There are no alarms set." His digital alarm clock isn't listening.
Fifteen minutes after that, the Alexa speaker in the young boy's room actually sounds the alarm, but this time with a remix of "Somebody That I Used To Know", by Goyte, Kimbra, that starts with the word "Anxiety", instead of the usual "Now and then". Fifteen minutes after the snooze, the siren of his digital alarm clock wails again. Now, the oldest brother gets involved by pulling the plug of the digital alarm clock-- something he has done many times before.
DETOX UPDATE (week 2)
Exhibit 3: March 23 - March 29 Weekly Report.
Exhibit 4: March 30 - April 5 Weekly Report. Good progress so far with an 80% reduction in phone screen time over the previous two-week average. This does not include what I estimate to be an additional 25 to 30 hour reduction of weekly non-screen time usage (media consumption), bringing my total reduction in overall weekly phone usage to about 90% or 45 hours. Note that the "Social" category was not generated this week.
For sure, I have had withdrawal symptoms and relapses as seen on Wednesday when I looked at my phone for over two hours-- doing what on my phone? I do not remember. On the withdrawal front, I had a strange experience after deciding to set my phone down on Day 1 (see Exhibit 2).
I was afraid that I would relapse quickly, so I made a rule that my phone would stay on my nightstand as long as I was not going out of the house. I woke up and set my phone down on my nightstand after checking for notifications. Next, I went to the bathroom to take out my retainer and get a glass of water. As I reached to take out my retainer, I looked down to see my phone on the bathroom counter! It was like something out of a horror movie! My phone had teleported from my nightstand to the bathroom counter all on its own-- I could not escape so easily. Nonetheless, I paused, picked up my phone, and walked it back to my nightstand where I told it to "Sit and stay."
What is Multitasking?
I'm sure many of you reading this have run into some variation of the following situations:
"I hate studying for exams, but listening to music helps lighten the pain."
"I need to do the dishes and wipe down the counters, which requires no brain power, so I might as well learn something from a podcast or listen to an audiobook at the same time."
What many people call "multitasking", I call Attention Multithreading. Attention Multithreading is the capacity to allocate whole units of attention back and for between two or more tasks at a rapid pace, creating the perception of performing both tasks with full attention. Multithreading in single core computing is when a single source of computer memory and computational capacity is being shared between multiple threads that are taking turns feeding the core steps of multiple tasks. The core is executing concurrent, but not parallel, steps of more than one activity to be completed (such as running a web browser and a Word document at the same time). However, core computing occurs ten million times faster than the firing of neurons in the human brain. Therefore, computers are much better at giving off the appearance of multitasking than we are. That being said, human neurons do still fire at a rate of hundreds of times per second, so we are still multithreading at a substantial rate.
There are various levels of multitasking that fall into categories based on the attention required for each task to be performed adequately. I'm going to call these categories of "multimedia-tasking". The result of the categories is the relative attention required of the task to be completed compared to the media to be consumed. Essentially, the question this chart is trying to answer is "What determines which threads get priority access to the brain's compute?"
Exhibit 5: "Attention Allocation of 'Multimedia-tasking'" table.
In Exhibit 3, I make the assumption that humans have only one core and that core can be allocated as all limited resources can be: by percentage. Now before you start crying and shouting in dismay that "I am capable of multitasking!" and "Ask me a question while I'm on my phone and I'll answer it correctly!", I would ask you to look up the daily impact of "distracted driving" on our society here in the United States. Or as I would define it, multitasking (performing driving + another act):
- on average, nine people die and nearly 890 people are injured every day in the United States due to distracted driving.
- 8% of fatal crashes, 14% of injury crashes, and 13% of all police-reported motor vehicle traffic crashes
I would guess these numbers to be conservative, given propensity of some to not admit to driving distracted; or perhaps they do not even remember they were driving distracted, due to the trama of being in an accident. And let's not even get into driving while intoxicated. So, I'm using that assumption! Get over it! Or go learn quantum physics.
My theory is that the complexity of Activity A relative to the complexity of Activity B will determine how computational steps get allocated to the brain. If both activities are of equal complexity, they will receive equal priority; any imbalance in complexity will result in an imbalance of attention. Now, you might be asking, "If you don't believe in 'multitasking', how can you make a chart that splits your supposedly indivisible object into less than the whole?" The answer is that my chart is not splitting a moment of attention, but rather the percentages represent an average allocation of moments of attention over time. Let's look at the following example:
Exhibit 6: "Attention Allocation of 'Multimedia-tasking': An Example" table.
I have chosen, in Exhibit 6, two activities I consider complex and two activities I consider simple. I take these activities and crossbreed them to be performed together in 100 second intervals. I do feel that, at this point, I may be using the brain's neural compute and the brain's attention interchangeably, which is not my goal. Physically speaking, neurons have to be firing for someone to move and listen to music at the same time because sweeping does not block the vibration of stereocilia, but having conscious attention on one set of neurons impacts both analysis and memory (see inattentional blindness). Also, importance to the performer might be a better measure than complexity. Someone could argue that listening to classical music is far more complex than an audiobook if trying to understand the work and not only enjoy.
Relaxing Sounds
An Alexa speaker plays "Relaxing Sounds" 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Where the speaker is located, no one knows, but one hopes that whoever is listening is feeling relaxed.
DETOX UPDATE (week 3)
Exhibit 7: April 6 - April 12 Weekly Report. A 49% reduction in screen usage over the previous week.
On Thursday my screen time was 0 minutes. Is it even possible to be a productive, competitive individual in 2025 without using a cell phone? I would argue that, although my weekly net productivity has likely decreased, the rate at which I am accomplishing meaningful goals has increased drastically. And the quality of work that I am outputting is higher than in previous weeks. Additionally, I find myself feeling less anxious and more fulfilled throughout my day. Lastly, I find myself appreciating moments of leisure with enhanced joy and appreciation.
Attention Deficit Disorder
There are two effects I want to expound on from multimedia-tasking: First, which tasks we choose to perform and second, how well we perform them.
Is a task worth doing if we aren't willing to give it our full attention?
This question is targeted at the common belief that technology and phones always make us more productive. Whether calling a cab, booking a flight, or raising children, most people agree that phones (mobile compute) help us get things done faster, easier, and better than before. However, what is really happening is a basic economic market with a scarce resource: our attention. Although phones may have initially freed up attention taken by activities, I wonder if they have enabled us to pursue activities that do not align with our personal goals or at least reduce the intentionality of our actions.
For example, let's say my neighbor asks me to mow their lawn for them because they are out of town and let's assume to building a positive relationship with my neighbor is not one of my goals. However, one of my goals is to read a book on my book list and that is a higher priority than helping out my neighbor. In 2006, I could really only choose to do one of those activities for an hour, but in 2025, I could say, well, let me see if I can find a podcast or audiobook that I could listen to while mowing my neighbor's lawn. The mobile phone in a way reduces the cost of the lawn mowing activity by allowing me to pursue something adjacent to my goals at the same time. At the end of the mowing, however, I have not completed my goal.
Additionally, how much longer did mowing the lawn take because I decided to listen to something? Did I have to spend five minutes searching for a book or show or music? Did I have to spend another five minutes finding my bluetooth headphones, pairing them, making sure they are charged afterwards? Did allocated moments cause me to miss mowing portions of the lawn that I then had to go back and mow later? Did it take me five minutes longer to get my neighbor's lawn mower running and cutting because I was allocating attention units to the media? It's very possible that a 60-minute mowing task turns into a 75-80 minute mowing task when combined with a media activity. So, even if my relationship with my neighbor was more important than reading a book, I would argue that giving full attention to the mowing task would help me accomplish my other goals faster because it could leave me 15-20 minutes of full attention to reading my book.
To summarize, I have been asking myself the following question before accepting or performing a task, especially if I'm going to listen to media: Would I still do this task if I had to give it 100% of my attention? If not, then it is not a task worth doing. This mindset puts a premium on your attention and specifically your full attention. Next, we will look at why full attention even matters.
As I mentioned in my opening statement, there are often times tasks that require immense precision in order to have any value at all. There is always a range of precision required to perform a task. In the lawn mowing example, missing a single blade of grass getting cut will probably not affect the perceived quality of the work performed. And as I mentioned, someone may get so distracted that they miss an entire strip of grass which sometimes looks even worse than if the grass hadn't been cut at all, like a bad haircut. This mistake is obvious and like I said may simply require a few extra minutes of mowing to clean up the missed spots. Where precision might matter is where subtle things get missed than can add up to an unfortunate outcome.
Zoning out while mowing might lead to a variety of quality assurance issues. For example, maybe I miss a wet patch in the lawn and tear through the grass into the dirt with the wheels of the mower? Maybe the mower doesn't have a catcher for the clippings, and I accidentally spray clipping all over freshly place bark dust and the driveway? Or I miss a huge dandelion puffball and spread the seeds throughout the lawn. Perhaps, to many people, these things don't matter, but if impressing your neighbor was your goal and they come home to a ripped-up lawn covered in grass clippings, you will have surely failed. Or maybe like Greg says in Diary of a Wimpy Kid, if you don't want to do something, be bad at it.
Here are the two potential risks I see to multitasking in general and how they are enabled by smartphones:
1. Performing tasks that you wouldn't have otherwise performed had your attention not been split.
2. The quality of output is affected by the percentage of attention time allocated to it.
Can I have my ears back please?
Rarely these days do words get to travel freely from a son's larynx to his mother's stereocilia. Between the two lays an Apple AirPod-- It gets to decide what goes in. Does It get to decide what is said?
DETOX UPDATE (week 4)
Exhibit 9: April 13 - April 19 Weekly Report. A 49% reduction in screen usage over the previous week.
My daily average screen time creeped up this week. I decided to look something up on Thursday night, right before bed, and I guess that added some 40 minutes to the day.
False Promises
Part I: The Promise
Growing up, all I ever wanted was a smartphone. I had various phone dealers that would give me access to games on their phone-- from friends to family members. There were three sides to my desire for a phone: status, achievement, and access to knowledge. Status is where it started.
I wouldn't have even known that games existed on phones if it weren't for my friends at school playing them during breaks. As the only the one in the group who couldn't share in analyzing, comparing, and exploring my status in popular games, I was left with nothing to show to my friends and really, with no way to connect with them. It was very isolating. I would guess it was similar to not having a car in the last century and everyone could drive to the mall or movie theater to meet up, except you.
People had other stuff too, like SnapChat, but that wasn't my drug. In fact, at my young age, SnapChat seemed like a gateway to federal prison. If the rumors I heard about my high school and other schools nearby had any truth to them, high quality cameras on phones had greatly increased supply to the child pornography industry. I personally never consumed a single image due to my desire to not commit felonies (or be accused of them) and to not participate in the destruction of my peer's lives, but some of my closest friends did participate and reported back to me on occasion. I believe my natural inclinations led me to feel compassion for those who were on the outside of our community and a resistance to their social crucifixion. According to my mother, it was evident at a young age that I was a socially cautious spirit; based on my first social interactions with other children around age 2. Nevertheless, resistance is not the same thing as immunity.
I cared deeply about what others thought of me and that was a great motivator for having a phone. Like cars, even what type of phone raised your status. There were poor kids who had some Motorola or Samsung trash, which was maybe worse than no phone, but I remember one day we were all waiting for Spanish class to start and a kid pulled out the new iPhone 8. It was basically a scene from Diary of a Wimpy kid. The clouds parted and a celestial aura formed around this kid whose status had been temporarily raised to #1, since it was the first news of someone we knew to get the newest model iPhone. This is no knock on smartphones though because if high school teaches kids anything, it's that caring about other people's opinion of your status is stupid-- that is, if you want to live a happy life.
Videogames also provided a cheap sense of achievement. Most achievements in our reality require intense, grueling effort, but in the digital world, we often play with simple terms. The best class of games that demonstrate this are called clickers. It's in the name, you click and you win. As the producer of any clicker or idle game, I define an arbitrary line of code that signals success and you must click (or pay) to access my success. Here is a simple one-line clicker game written in Python:
print("Success!")
All you have to do is click and you can have as much success as you want. Venmo me $5 and I'll double the amount of success you get with each click.
The third motivator was access to knowledge. A few years after the smartphone revolution, the podcast revolution began. My parents had been occasionally listening to podcasts about current events, economics, and people's lives. I had known I was living in a cultural and familial bubble, and I wanted to pop it. My first recognition of the bubble was when I was riding the bus home to school in 8th grade. I overheard the kid behind me explaining to another kid that he had tried weed for the first time when I was 8 years old because his older brother let him try it. This kid lived in government subsidized housing and I knew that at a very young age, he and I had been dealt very different hands in the game of life. This created an obsession to understand people's experiences, along with everything else in the world, so that I could have as close to accurate understanding of the state of the world. And podcasts were a way to do that for nearly free while I did my daily chores.
TLDR: I wanted a phone.
Part II: Return on Investment (ROI)
"And I’ve got a TV show and a movie, and I’d just like to show you the TV show here. This is an episode from The Office."
- Steve Jobs iPhone 2007 Presentation
When I turned 16, I got my first smartphone. The following year was the most fun ever. So where did it go wrong?
I will say that generally during that first year, I reaped the positive benefits of having a smartphone. I was able to contribute more in class, learn about the world, and connect with my friends and family members in ways I couldn't before. However, after one year, I took time to analysis the return I got from filter my time through this tool that supposedly, exponentially, increases human productivity.
During that year, I had gone from being an A student to a B student. I had stopped spending so much time learning about the world and connecting with people because at some point my phone time transitioned from knowledge to entertainment. I watched the tv show The Office several times on my phone, just like Jobs had promised I would. I came to the conclusion that I had a very serious problem and that I was about to begin a war that had been brewing for eight years and whose conflict would last many more, if not forever.
It began with deleting Netflix off of my phone. Eventually, that turned into deleting YouTube and all of my videogames. I deleted all of my social media accounts, not only uninstalling the app, so that there was nothing left for me to hold on to. I was a straight A student my senior year and had the highest weighted GPA in my high school class at graduation.
Please hold. Your call is very important to us.
A young man attempts to negotiate time to get lifesaving info to his cousin, who is under fire in the popular online videogame PUBG. The negotiator on the other line is no pushover, as she is the young man's girlfriend. He starts the negotiations saying, "He needs me to talk for a bit because it's the end of the match!", but she isn't having it and threatens to end the call. The young man ups the offer saying, "You could watch your Netflix show while we play?" She accepts the terms of agreement and is put on hold while the game plays out.
DETOX UPDATE (week 5)
Exhibit 10: April 20 - April 26 Weekly Report. A 49% reduction in screen usage over the previous week.
During early seasons of the tv gameshow Survivor, boredom, second only to hunger, was the top complaint of contestants. The game show has been sped up in recent years, but there used to be a lot of down days where nothing related to progressing the game occurred. Contestants just had to sit around, with no clock and no indication that something interesting was going to happen any time soon. To stave off the boredom, they did what just about anyone does when they are camping: they sat around the fire pit and watched the fire burn.
As I wrap up Week 5 of my smartphone detox, I find myself watching the forest a lot-- there's not much else to do while eating apple slices and peanut butter. Last week, I saw two bunnies playing some sort of game. Bunny A would run towards Bunny B and right before contact, Bunny B would spring up into the air. Then both bunnies would go back to eating like nothing had happened, until Bunny A worked up the nerve for another surprise attack. Today, I watched two Steller's Jays harass a squirrel that was trying to go up the trunk of a large pine tree. The squirrel wasn't happy with the attention, so he made his way back to thicker forests as the two birds kept swooping in to attack.
My view of the forest is often impeded by our housecat who stares back at me, wishing I would go out and sit with him. He meows loudly because he is bored of laying down by himself all day. Sometimes I go out and sit with him because I too am lonely and even though he is smelly and covers my clothes in hair, affection is still affection. I guess I understand why the longer someone is single, the probability of them getting a cat or dog approaches 1.
Closing Statement
What is the value of human souls?
Apple, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms rank as the 1st, 4th, and 6th most valuable companies in the United States as of 4/17/2025, respectively. Netflix and Spotify have a combined market cap of over 500 billion dollars. If you're curious to know, I even own shares of their publicly traded stock. I figure I might as well get paid for my time.
What will be the consequence of our addiction? Will we leave the physical world behind? Will we "connect and share with friends and family through mobile devices", as Meta Platforms states is its mission in its latest 10-K filing? Or will we do the opposite, exploring our own individual worlds online? Maybe we will we create the matrix within the matrix. So meta.
Source:
Unfortunately, I have a very pessimistic view at the moment. To say something positive first, I think that, as with most things, there will be a spectrum of outcomes, probably following a normal curve. A few individuals, such as I, who are naturally inclined to stubbornness, will fight their way out of this epidemic. These individuals will be stronger than most because they will have a set of rules and principles that they place above all other priorities-- because we are too afraid to return to the places we've been, but even when we do, we will know how to get out again.
As for the pessimistic forecast, I will address both micro and macro-observations and maybe come to some rudimentary predictions, but ones that I can't say will come to pass with any sort of conviction. On a micro scale, I'm witnessing children and adolescents who are more insecure than even I was. Enhancing status has been a struggle for many thousands of years, and not something new, but I see actions that go beyond even some of my most embarrassing teenaged coping mechanisms. I can't imagine the mental and emotional abuse and warfare that must be occurring in the minds of teenagers today-- and in environments that are so much softer and protected than what I grew up in, only ten years ago.
I see a level of internal dissatisfaction with life that is so consistently high, that death by suicide of those around me has become a daily worry in the back of my mind. I fear closed doors, and what I might find if I had to open them. I have never been in an environment so emotionally heavy, while at the same time surrounded by so much material prosperity and natural beauty.
Damn, the devil drives a hard bargain. I have been many places and done many things because the opportunity was there, but was it worth the cost? Perhaps it was worth finding out how many cheeseless cheese stations there are in the world.
What will be the macro impact of all this? It's hard to say. I meet people, often for only a few minutes at a time, and they don't appear to be wrapped up in all of this. Are most people fine? How can most people be fine if the average American is consuming 8.5 hours of digital media content a day? Someone must be giving up their hours.
Meta Platforms current average Annual Revenue Per User is approx. $266 dollars for American users.
Sources:
Facebook Revenue and Usage Statistics (2025) - Business of Apps
75+ Latest Meta Statistics & Facts for 2025
75+ Latest Meta Statistics & Facts for 2025
Exhibit 10: Aggregated estimates of daily time spent scrolling by Americans on major social media platforms.
Sources:
I liked these two statistics because they demonstrate how much your time is worth to others and some perspective on whether or not smartphones are adding value to our lives. My goal is to use this one slice of a very large pie to help you extrapolate to the rest of the ways people use their smartphones. This way, I don't have to do a breakdown of mobile gaming, TV, pocasts, etc. The reason why I wanted to pick this part is because I think it's fair to assume that time spent scrolling content likely provides zero support in a person's goals and only exists for dopamine hits. I want you to pause.
Pause.
This is only time spent scrolling --> time spent on a self-pleasing activity. Using Meta as the example, the revenue per user per hour spent scrolling is approximately $1.45. I'm going to make a rough guess that TikTok and X bring in close to the same amount of revenue as Meta and say that the average American sells 14% of their attention (life) to the above three companies for $532 of revenue per year. And in return, they get to spend that 14% of their life alone, high, and without purpose. While this next projection violates some rules of economics, the current valuation of 100% of a person's life spent in this manner is $3,800 per year or about $1.2 trillion for all Americans. My question is, would you buy a pill that gives you 14% more time for everything that is important to you if it costs $532 per year? $34,000 for nine more years of life? Maybe not. But anyway, this is my estimate: a human soul can be bought for approximately $246,740 in lifetime revenues.
Here is the revenue per hour formula: [ Meta average Annual Revenue Per User ] + [ estimated average Annual Revenue Per User of TikTok and X ] / [ estimated Annual Hours on Feed ] = $266 * 2 / 821 hours = $0.65 / hour
Here is the attention per year formula: [ estimated Annual Hours on Feed ] / [ Annual Waking Hours ] = 821 hours / ( 24 hours - 8 hours ) * 365 ) = 14%
*I'm using a lot of estimates and making some unfair comparisons between data, but I hope that my extremely conservative approach to evaluating time spent on a smartphone in this manner will outweigh my misuses of the data. For an example of my conservatism, I did not include YouTube since it is not a social media, although it has a feed feature and is the most popular media platform among children.
Do you think Meta is succeeding in their mission? Does your family feel more connected due to mobile devices?
Here is the opening line of Meta's public financial statements (same source as above): "Our mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible." I wonder what type of future they are envisioning. I have a few thoughts and a final prediction as we wrap up.
In the last year, I have thought a lot about an experiment conducted by the NIH in the 1970s called Universe 25. In this experiment, researcher John B. Calhoun builds a mouse utopia and witnessed something he termed, "Behavorial Sink." Behavorial sink can be described at a high level as the following steps:
- Breakdown of social structures
- Increased aggression and violence
- Neglect of offspring
- Asexual behavior
- Population declines and extinction
Source:
Are you seeing any of the above five behaviors at a macro scale in countries or online? Many people call the above five things progress and would be offended at them being categorized as behavioral sink. If you are one of those people, I am not here to judge you or change your lifestyle. I just thought it might be good if everyone was aware of the deal they are making. You are selling your soul (and the souls of your children, born and unborn) for pennies on the dollar and I for one think and hope that you are worth much more than that. And I hope that I am worth more than that as well.
Thank you for joining me on this journey over the last few weeks. It has been a story 16 years in the making since when the first iPhone came out. I still remember something of my first interaction with an iPhone: it was during a family hike to a waterfall, and I was showed a game on the phone. Little me played that little game, with my little fingers going Tap Tap, Tap Tap-- rarely ever looking up to view the world and people around me.
Can I have my ears back please? (Pt. II)
For years his father never called, and he didn't call his father. There wasn't any animosity between them; the son didn't know what it was. A part of him figured his father was giving his limited time outside of work to the younger siblings who deserved just as much time with their father as the son had when he was younger. Thus, the son was excited to move back home after many years away because it felt like an opportunity to reconnect with his father.One evening, he said, "Hey Dad," during dinner. His dad was watching a YouTube video on his phone with an Apple AirPod in his ear. The son got no indication that the father had heard him, so he went back to eating his soup. Of course, the son did not blame his father for not hearing him; for the son would have done the same in his father's pods.
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