There’s a story I remember reading as a kid. In it, a boy is given a silver ball with a magic thread inside. Whenever he pulls on the thread, time leaps forward. A little pull and suddenly the bell rings and math class is over. Waiting in line? Pull the thread and your wait is over. Monday blues? A slightly more forceful tug will whisk you to the start of the next weekend. Want winter to end and spring to arrive? Pull the thread.
By the end of the story, the boy is an old man. He’s raced through his childhood, adolescence and adulthood in what felt to him like a matter of weeks. Somewhere, hidden in all those unpleasant and tedious moments, was life itself.
Much of the allure of smartphones is that they give us the power of the magic thread. Life is filled with tedious moments: waiting for the bus, washing dishes, walking to the store, waiting for your dinner companion to come back from the restroom. Turning to our phones allows us to opt out of experiencing these moments by hitting our brains with a wave of endlessly novel and momentarily captivating images and sounds.
It feels harmless enough. I’m not talking about ignoring your kids on a rare vacation or scrolling through dinner with friends. Those are life’s best moments, and it’s obvious why trading them for a dopamine hit is a bad bargain.
But what about the forgettable moments — the ones that barely register. What do we miss if we scroll instead of staring out a bus window? What do we gain by thinking while we do the dishes instead of listening to another podcaster drone on? Are our thoughts really that profound?
Most often, they aren’t. But that’s not the point. The point is that, like the little boy from the story, we will eventually discover that checking out of life’s tedious moments means checking out of life itself.
Research shows that people who have regular small interactions with strangers — chatting with the store clerk, holding a door — are happier than those who don’t. We think our happiness comes only from our closest relationships, but these brief connections with strangers make us feel seen.
Maybe our ultimate satisfaction depends just as much on the moments we dismiss as pointless and dull — the ones that most tempt us to pull the thread.
This, increasingly, is my suspicion. As a hopeless phone addict, who regularly scrolls through these moments, I feel that something vital is being lost — that my life is less rich than it could be — than it used to be.
I also sense that there is a dangerous feedback loop at work. The more I scroll through dull moments, the less tolerance I have for boredom, and the more moments seem intolerably dull. The more you pull the thread, the more you want to pull it and the faster you pull.
For years now, I have been wondering what I can do to escape this cycle. Mostly, I have tried to pursue a policy of moderation. This policy has largely failed.
Back when I smoked cigarettes, I had a fantasy that if I could only manage to become a light smoker, I would never have to quit. This fantasy kept me trapped in addiction far longer than I needed to be. I only became free when I realized that moderation with an inherently addictive substance is impossible.
This realization is slowly dawning on me again in regards to smartphones. A technology that is designed to keep us hooked is not one that most people will succeed in using moderately. But with smartphones, the situation is perhaps worse. In the course of about two decades, we have remade our world into a place where it is nearly impossible to function without this technology.
Smartphones once promised us convenience if we used them. They now threaten isolation and irrelevance if we desist from them. I don’t have a tidy solution. But I am not giving up. I don’t want to be that boy with the silver ball, tugging at the thread until nothing is left. I’ve already let too much of this one irreplaceable life slip through my fingers. We all have.
In the coming weeks, I’ll devote these columns to trying to break free — while still living in a world where smartphones are nearly compulsory. I’ll share what works, what doesn’t, and whatever small moments I manage to reclaim, in the hope others might reclaim them too.
Matthew Schultz is a Jewish Journal columnist and rabbinical student at Hebrew College. He is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (Tupelo, 2020) and lives in Boston and Jerusalem.
