Digital Detox and the Great Unscroll

In a world wired for breaking news and dopamine scrolling, writer and dad-of-two, Jason Bartz, did the unthinkable- he ditched his smartphone for a dumb phone. Not as a gimmick, but as a line in the sand — for his time, his kids, and his sanity.

Jason takes us into the raw aftermath of stepping off the digital treadmill: the awkward boredom, the unexpected quiet, and the intense way the world starts to show up again — on a run, at the dinner table, in the small, ordinary moments with his kids. He brings us into a bare-bones world where film cameras slow your pulse, fewer choices open more space, and presence stops being a luxury.

We also get into the hard stuff: data mining, kids’ apps, and how to model balance in a culture that  pushes “more screen, more now.

If you’ve ever looked up from your screen and thought, “I need a reset” this conversation is your nudge to try something different.

(( Whoa! It must be in the air- Ryan Holiday, of the daily Stoic, did a podcast episode with NY Times, bestselling author, Sebastian Unger called: "Log Off Now." "Sebastian talks about why he refuses to get a smartphone, how technology gives us the illusion of control..."   Check it out: https://dailystoic.com/youre-addicted-to-the-illusion-of-control-sebastian-junger-pt-1/

Today's episode is brought to you by the Joan of Arc Scroll Medal, a beautiful brass alloy medal, designed by award-winning artist, Pat Benincasa. This uniquely shaped medal is ideal for holiday or as a special occasion gift!    Visit www.patbenincasa-art.com

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Please Note: The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of the podcaster.

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Chapters

• 0:00 From Off-The-Clock To Always On
• 3:17 Meet Jason And The Dumb Phone Leap
• 5:04 Work, Family, And The Tethered Mind
• 7:37 Streaming For The Distracted Brain
• 9:22 Reclaiming Time And The Value Of Boredom
• 12:15 Running Without AirPods, Thinking Deeper
• 16:30 Seeing Your World Again
• 18:15 The Bowed Head Epidemic
• 20:49 Presence Over Proof: Rethinking Photos
• 25:37 I Post, Therefore I Am
• 28:33 The Slow Movement, Then And Now
• 32:22 Slow Living Habits That Stick
• 36:12 Navigating Without GPS And Relearning Place
• 39:46 Parenting, Phones, And Modeling Balance
• 43:16 Data Mining And Digital Consent
• 46:32 First Steps Toward A Saner Screen Life

Transcript

Pat:

Filled to Capacity where heart grit and irreverent humor collide. A podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference.

Pat:

Hi, I am Pat Benincasa, and this is Fill To Capacity. So glad you're here. Episode 123, "Digital Detox and the Great Unscroll." Now, before we begin, let's go back to the 1990s. A time when the workday had a door, you left the office, you went home, then email moved to your desktop, and then to your pocket. Suddenly you were always reachable. Now, this drive for productivity turned into a forced march of expectation- you being on call. And in that shift, we lost something, the simple right to go home and be off the clock. And then June 29th, 2007, the first iPhone landed a device that didn't just deliver calls. It put the internet in everybody's pocket. Suddenly the boundary between life and device shrank, screen time sword and attention flickered, we entered a phone in hand. Culture everywhere we went, coffee shop, theater, carpool school, dinner table, watching tv, everybody had the phone in hand.

Pat:

So we have a lot to talk about today. And joining me is Jason Bartz, a father of two, and a writer from Buffalo, New York. Now Jason stands right where family Life, technology and intentional living meet, when he ditched his smartphone for a simple dumb phone. He didn't just change devices, he changed his values. And by the way, last April, I talked with Olivia Telecki, a Gen Z College student about stepping away from constant screen time. Today with Jason, we're taking that conversation further. We'll look at what it takes to step off the digital treadmill, what shows up when we reclaim space, and how simplicity can open the door to a different kind of freedom. So if you ever caught yourself scrolling instead of living, this episode is for you. Welcome, Jason. So nice to have you here.

Jason:

Pat, thanks so much for having me. That is quite the intro, and I am in total agreement with you. The 1990s, the early two thousands were a wildly different time in a better way, and you brought up a great point, and that when you were done with work, even if you had an office job, when you left for the day, you were done. Sure, someone may call you, but that was it. And with the rise of work from home, and I think it being almost branded as freedom and more flexible, I think it's for many, become the opposite, where you become tethered to your phone, to your computer, because you're always on, you're always looking for those Slack notifications, email notification, because the lines from your personal life and your work life start the blur and, and you don't know when, when is the right time to disconnect, always engaged.

Pat:

That is a good point, and that's what we are going to jump into. So Jason, in your Medium article, "Going Back To Basics, The Appeal of a Dumb Phone in a World of Smart Phones," you wrote that your switch to a dumb phone was one of the best decisions you made. Will you take us back to that moment when you realized your smartphone was taking more than it was giving?

Jason:

Absolutely. It was, I think, a couple years into COVID, and I had just had my second child, my little girl, Tinsley, and this is about two years into also working from home after previously working in an office. And I was going through that same, you know, that same predicament of work would end, but never knowing when, when work would end. So I would find myself on a day to day, night to night basis, even with my kids at dinner, always thinking about even if I wasn't actively looking at my phone in the back of my head, it was always am I missing something at work? Is there is an email I need to check what's going on? If there was a ding or notification, I was looking at it. And oftentimes I would find myself on the couch while the kids are playing, you know, embarrassingly enough to say, sitting there, scrolling, replying the emails, doing work, and other times, of course, the opposite and just scrolling through social media and one day it just, you know, it just hit me.

Jason:

What am I doing? I am ignoring the life going around me, like my kids that are hanging out in front of me and wanting to play. Is there an alternative here? Is there a a simpler way to do things? So in researching and, and looking online at possibly some simpler alternatives or ways to enable screen time and whatnot, what took me down the rabbit hole, I would say to some of the dumb phone communities, uh, online on Reddit and some of these groups that is a growing community of people that have given up their smartphones to use something like a flip phone that we used to use, uh, to, to totally disconnect. And I ended up just jumping in headfirst to the astonishment of my wife and my friends and, and everyone, all of a sudden my bubble in, in the chats and everything would turn green. And everyone was pretty surprised with the decision. And it was certainly an adjustment, but it was certainly for the better.

Pat:

Now I wanna go in a little bit different direction. The UK Guardian did an article recently asked, is Netflix deliberately dumbing down TV so people can watch while scrolling? And then in another article by 34th Street Magazine, they pointed to Netflix rewriting scripts "for an audience that is more prone to social media scrolling and distracted watching." So, Jason, in an age where distraction is a given, what does being present mean to you now, especially as a father? And you made a huge decision.

Jason:

I think I've read those same articles about Netflix, and I think that is so true. You know, second screen movies, which is just a wild concept to even think about. I think that's probably a whole other podcast that you could have.

Pat:

Oh yes.

Jason:

But in terms of And if you do have that podcast and have someone on to talk about that subject, please let me know, because I'd love to listen to that. You know, in terms of what I've gained, right? From giving up smart device, giving up a smartphone, there is the giving up the distractions and, and not being tethered to notifications. There is that right? But reframing that it's reclaiming time when you think of screen time, right? And I think, I don't know the exact figures of the average screen time that an average adult American has, but six to eight hours a day, just think about that translated to what you can be doing throughout the day. Of course, not everyone is always 100% direct looking at their phone, but still even a fraction of that given back to you. What can you accomplish throughout the day?

Jason:

And it doesn't have to be productivity. And in my case, the goal wasn't to be necessarily more productive. Maybe that's an added benefit, but it's more of just being present and just being here many, many times, just not having the phone. And let's say things you don't think about being at a dentist appointment or a doctor's appointment or waiting for your oil to get changed. You're waiting for an hour, you don't have a phone. I mean, this is what we used to deal with, right? Yeah. Maybe there's not a, a slew of magazines, but you were forced to just sit there with your thoughts, which is something that I feel like we have not had to do for since 2007, right when the iPhone came out. We don't have these opportunities to really just sit there and think about things.

Jason:

Just, stillness outside of when we say, Hey, okay, I'm gonna land, meditate or whatnot, but this is right. This is just throughout your life, but being really forced to be bored. But I think being bored and boredom in your life there is incredibly important, forcing you to think, forcing you to recall, previous experiences and, think about things coming up, but just think about more than just what is going on right now in the present. But I think that just being aware and being present is something that has been lost, not being distracted, we're able to regain that.

Pat:

You wrote beautifully about going on long runs without music, allowed me to connect with myself in a way that I hadn't before. And it was a meditative experience. You go on to say it can be jarring at first, stuck with just your own thoughts and nothing to distract yourself with. But after the initial awkwardness wears off, it's cathartic. Now you're starting to talk about that. So on your runs, when you, when you took the AirPods out, all of a sudden you're running with yourself. What was it in that silence? What did you hear that you hadn't heard before? What did you discover?

Jason:

Yeah, the long runs, going from setting a playlist and being able to start that and go on a hour, sometimes two hour run, that was quite jarring at first. But after a while, it really does become, and I recommend this to anyone that is out, whether you're running or hiking or just out in nature to, you know, take out the AirPods or headphones, you know, just get out there and experience it because you're able to, this was honestly fairly eye-opening to me, but just being aware of where you are and noticing things that just around even your own neighborhood, but around your city, that when you're not listening to music or a podcast, no offense, right? While you're running, you start to notice things about just your neighbors and your neighbor's houses and new developments and kids playing and, and just things going on around you that on every single run you notice something different.

Jason:

It's really, it's a pretty incredible experience outside of just kind of just zoom zoned in on, you know, whatever you're listening to and your playlist. But beyond that, when you're not distracted by music, I mean, you're, you're able to just get into your own thoughts. Yeah, I mean, that just goes into what we were talking about before with, you know, being bored and, and being forced really to just think- you're by yourself, you're in your own head. But going on these long runs for many times for me was a time that I had an hour, hour and a half, two hours to sometimes think about, solve some problems, just think about something totally undistracted, whether it was work related, whether I was working out something personally. This was just time for myself. Which typically you don't really get access to.

Pat:

You know, I walk the neighborhood frequently and sometimes I would play this game with myself when I go start the walk. Look for five things you never noticed before. And at first when I started doing, I thought, well, I've walked, that's a great game, this neighborhood so many times, what am I gonna see? I know I'm embarrassed to say that I thought that, okay, so now when I walk the neighborhood, I almost train myself like, oh, I never noticed that before. Or, look at that. And it's a way for present moment and the world to reveal itself. If I have that frame of reference in my mind, as opposed to putting the AirPods in and listening to an audio book or a podcast. This is really an invitation to be in the world, is what you're talking about.

Jason:

That is exactly it, it's a reintroduction to life. And what is really eye-opening is when you stop, when you are not looking down, especially if you are in a crowded area, or if you are on a plane or at an airport, or you're on a subway or really anywhere, it doesn't matter. You name the place, right? You start to notice everybody. Everybody, it doesn't matter how old you are, whether it's a teenager or, or someone that's in their seventies, everyone is looking down at their phone waiting in line. If someone has to wait for even a minute, typically pulling out your phone and looking down. And that was probably the biggest eye-opener that I didn't even realize. And just thinking, oh, well that was, you know, that was me. Okay, I'm gonna order my food at Chipotle, wherever, and then just sit there with my, you know, with my head down. That hunch, you know, it was very surprising to, you know, to think about. And then in social settings at networking events or conferences, going there without a cell phone was a huge boon. It was a huge positive, just not having the opportunity to even look down and distract myself with a phone and just being available and open to, you know, to talk to anyone and everyone. Yeah.

Pat:

If I were queen for a day and I mandated, everyone has to look at their screen at all times. You cannot interact with anybody. You just have to look at your screen from the time you get up no matter what you're doing. And you have to isolate yourself in that screen. People say, wait a minute, wait a minute, what? But as you've just described, when you go out in your day, how many times do we see the bowed head in that digital prayer stance, if you will, staring at their phone? And it is a self-imposed isolation. We are locked in this isolated. The songs that I pick, the books that I I pick, the podcast that I pick, everything is between me, myself, and I, and what I'm allowing into my being. And that's what we're talking about here. We've suddenly become, uh, a country of isolated people in our own realm. Whereas before growing up, uh, at a time when radio was really popular, oh my god, kids would hear a song, everybody would be talking about it. If there was a news event the nightly news families watched, there was a sense of community driven by that. And now we're experiencing, I think, more of a individuation with this experience. What do you think about that?

Jason:

I think that it's a, a great point, and I think about what's upcoming, uh, with Thanksgiving, and I'm just thinking of recent Thanksgivings of the past decade with friends and family ahead of dinner, or even at the dinner table, depending on the family sitting around their phones. Yeah. Not talking, you know, not engaging, maybe football's on and still everyone's just, you know, hanging out, not, you know, not chatting with each other and rewind another 10 years. And well, that wasn't really possible because you, you couldn't really be <laugh>, you couldn't really be self isolating and in your own world because, you know, that didn't exist. So people were interacting and, and talking and having conversations. And I think that brought everyone a little closer together and started conversations. And for one, I, I think it could do a lot in terms of broadening some people's views on things when you're not just sucked into your, into your own newsfeed that's been heavily influenced by an algorithm, and you're able to actually have a conversation with someone else or other people that may have opposing views to you. And then that's how conversation starts. And I think maybe the world will be a little better place if people are actually having real conversations instead of just scrolling about, uh, the news and what's going on, and forming opinions, you know, strictly that way and only interacting online.

Pat:

You know, I wanna talk about another phenomenon. I often catch myself grabbing my phone the moment something special happens, snapping the shot instead of just staying in the moment. You chose to put the phone down so you could be present. What did that change teach you about memory and what actually matters?

Jason:

That was one of the biggest adjustments. Of course, with a smartphone, you can take an a near infinite amount of photos and you have one of the best digital cameras available at any moment, which is great on its own. And you know that that's, uh, an incredible achievement. Every photo starts to lose a little bit of its meaning over time. When I made the transition to using a phone and also raising two little kids that I previously was taking an incredible amount of photos of- it was a tough transition for a while. I was just kind of relying on my wife to take photos with her smartphone and share 'em with me. And I looked through them. Eventually I took up film photography and I bought a film camera and started taking photos that way. Still do today, which has been a incredible hobby, a fun hobby of mine for you to slow down and focus. You're only getting maybe a maximum of 36 exposures.

Pat:

For listeners who didn't grow up with film cameras, a roll of film only gives you 12, 24 or 36 shots. That's it. Back to Jason,

Jason:

You're only getting a finite number of shots. You have to really pause and think about, kind of like, I guess before the early two thousands when that's really all we had was, uh, film cameras. But is this a moment that I want to take a picture of? Otherwise it has forced me to force me in a good way, not force me in a, in a bad way, but force me to be more aware and present of what's going on and be more, I know we've been talking about more in the moment, but when, when something is going on, I'm not taking a photo of it. I am cognizant of that and just thinking this is an experience that I, you know, that I wanna remember that I'm just like, I'm just sitting there watching, you know, my son play soccer and score a ball and whatnot.

Jason:

I don't have the opportunity to record it. I'm not recording it right now, but I'm just enjoying it. Looking at it through, you know, through my own eyes and enjoying it in the moment on its own is a great experience. You don't feel like you have to whip out a phone and then look through a viewfinder at every moment. I feel like it does, even though it is a little restraining in some aspects, it is freeing others that I don't feel like I'd have to take a photograph for every single, you know, every single event. In some ways I think it is very freeing. I think in general, it's just been a fun, a fun hobby to pick up.

Pat:

This highlights a larger cultural shift, you know, as a visual artist, I'm a cultural worker basically, and as an artist, it's like- My life is about observing the culture at large as well, you know, micro macro views. And if we zoom out for a moment, what we're talking about highlights a larger cultural shift, when did we stop simply experiencing a moment for the need to record it? And it's as if our real life doesn't count unless it goes live on social media. So now what we've done, we've introduced a mediated element, uh, sort of like health insurance between the doctor and you. It's the third party in the middle. Well, we've brought in the third party in the middle from our experience to what's happening to the event, and then to how we process it so it doesn't count unless it goes live on social media. What are your thoughts about that?

Jason:

I could not agree more with, with that statement that for many things aren't real, things don't exist or things have not happened if they're not posted to Instagram or Facebook. I, I've heard people say that, right? If this wasn't posted, people won't know, right? So how will they know that we did whatever? And, and you see, I think this has been talked about, um, but I think it is damaging to, well, to I think society as a whole, but especially to young kids and teenagers coming up, that the only thing that you, you're really seeing online and social media are people's best moments and highlight reels. No one's posting their everyday lives for the most part. Uh, you're only posting your highlight reels and the big achievements, the big moments, your vacations, big purchases, buying a home and when your feed is, is just curating these things for you.

Jason:

You know, that is your world, right? Yes. If that's all you're looking at on your phone, then that becomes your perception of reality is that, oh, oh my God, my my friends and family are all successful in doing all these things, and they're all buying houses and buying cars, and I can't afford a, a car and I'm never gonna be able to buy a house. And you start to get depressed. Yeah, right? But that's not necessarily the reality, but that's the byproduct of everyone just living through the filtered lenses of, of, of social media and having that be that intermediary medium, you know, between things. Uh, so I, I totally agree with you.

Pat:

I can't help but think that René Descartes is spinning in his grave when he says, "I think therefore I am." It's now we've evolved to "I post, therefore I am." That's it.

Jason:

That is good. <laugh>.

Pat:

I tell you, I think about these things a lot, Jason. Okay. So I wanna shift gears here and talk about something called the Slow Movement. The Slow Movement is. A cultural shift that encourages people to slow down and live more mindfully. Slow isn't a trend, it's a decision. Pick depth over pace, presence over speed, meaning over multitasking. Okay, you guys, one of the perks of doing a a podcast is that you research the hell outta everything. So I started thinking about, hey, where did this Slow idea begin? Okay. Backstory, coming in 1986, a protest against McDonald's opening in Rome, Italy sparked the Slow Food Movement, which celebrated traditional regional cuisine, local farming, and taking your time to enjoy meals. Now, I don't need to tell you that you're talking about a country where eating a meal is an art form. Okay, I digress. The slow food movement gave rise to the Slow Movement, and by the way, that McDonald's did open in Rome, but it featured Italian sourced ingredients, including the McItaly burger made with a hundred percent Italian beef and regional toppings. Okay, back to the story. So, Jason, with the way we move so fast in this country, the US with constant screen time, if we put away the phone or get a dumb phone, it almost feels like a protest against our own habits. What does slow look like in your daily life now?

Jason:

Yeah, great question. And I did my own research going into this as well. But Slow living today on a day-to-day basis looks like cooking a meal at home, cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you know, preparing it for the family. Like I'm the one that cooks here, and it's just cooking from scratch, being able to prepare something with love for your family. After I got rid of the phone, another thing that I wanted to do, actually, something that I did try to do prior to getting rid of the phone is getting off of the social media news feeds and everything. So, started to look for alternative news sources or ways to get my news, you know, in another form of Slow Living is, I started subscribing to paper newspapers. At first, it was a, a publication called Delayed Gratification.

Jason:

It is a quarterly publication that sums up the previous quarter of news, but instead of giving the up to the minute, up to the week, up to the day news and headlines and everything, it only is giving you the stories from start to finish. In conclusion, so, so they're not sensationalized, they're not, you know, these big headlines, but it is giving that last quarter of news, it was a pretty interesting concept. I think it, it's a British publication, but they cover the national news. So, you know, that was one aspect. And also getting the New York Times, you know, was another one to, you know, just catch up on news, just getting the, the Sunday paper, you know, and it's also some things that we've already talked about. It's going on walks, going on runs, totally disconnected sometimes without, you know, without any music going into nature.

Jason:

Taking my kids for a, a hike into the park disappearing. Probably one of the things that you have to adjust for the most, I think right away is not having Google Maps or Apple Maps as you know, when you plug in your phone and having that on your car. Talk about eye-opening experience. I know we've talked about a lot of eye-opening experiences so far in this talk. That was a major one because I started to realize that by habit, I was, even if I knew how to get somewhere, still putting it in, in case just to see if, oh, there might be a crash somewhere or backed up traffic. So I wanna make sure I'm on the most optimized route. I would just tell myself that. But over years and years and years of doing this and then taking that away, I kind of realized that I don't know a lot of the, I don't know how to get anywhere for the most part.

Jason:

I can get away, I can get, you know, to some important spots, right? Get to work or get to my in-law's house. But if I need to get anywhere and outside of that, I would really have to think about it, which juxtaposed against, even when I was, when I was 19, I remember taking a trip from here in Buffalo to Philadelphia without any GPS. I just kind of figured it out, without a smartphone- I can never imagine doing that now. But being able to driving and navigating without a phone over time or without GPS in general, starts to, I think, connect you a little bit more with your city and kind of like going for runs and just being aware of what's going on. Same thing with driving and, and seeing more zoomed out perspective. Seeing your city, you know, seeing your town, you know, seeing your state in general, what's going on?

Pat:

I wanna go in a different directions. Parents today are wrestling with a big question, when is the right age to hand a child their first smartphone? In a world that rewards nonstop screen time, now you've got two kids growing up in this world of screens, which you've walked away from. How do you model balance instead of bombardment? And what would you say to parents, like, they're really agonizing about this. When do I give my child a smartphone?

Jason:

That is a tough question. In terms of other parents, well, I guess starting with, starting with my own kids when I would give them a smartphone, uh, this is, I, I, I mean, I've joked with my wife that, uh, we've joked together that when they're late teenagers or when they're 18, I don't know if it's necessarily realistic in, um, you know, in today's world we know that there are some of the child alternatives that are less intrusive. But I think a lot of it starts with, for one, modeling the behavior and showing them that a, you can want live a life that you don't have to be connected and scrolling and, uh, be addicted, you know, to, to your phone all the time. And I think also the other part of that, besides just them seeing it on the day-to-day, you know, not seeing their dad sitting on their phone all the time when they may go to their friend's house or see others, or they're always on their phones and how, active I am with them.

Jason:

And also the other part is just having the conversations and having the, just talking with them about it and, you know, without telling them what to do, but really framing it, um, and explaining why I'm doing what I'm doing. You know, why, you know, cell phones and social media, you know, can be negative, but, you know, having the conversation, modeling the behavior. But in terms of, you know, when we would introduce a cell phone, we haven't set an exact age yet. My kids are five and three years old. It's not gonna be anytime soon, but right now, I feel like it's going to be a maturity when we think they're ready, when it becomes also a necessity, you know, that they would need. But that would come with setting those expectations with them. And for other parents, I think it's on a family by family basis.

Pat:

Another aspect to this is that studies show that iPhones have hundreds of thousands of apps pulling data from your phone, tracking where you are. How you move what you're doing, even when you didn't fully allow it to do that. Then on Android phones, the amount of data apps can collect is even greater, and kid apps aren't any better. Many of them collect things like your device's ID numbers or your child's location. And by the way, a device ID number is like a digital fingerprint. It doesn't tell them your name, but it lets companies track you across apps and across websites. When you stop and think about it, our phones know an awful lot about us. Jason, once you realized how much your phone was collecting, I mean, would that impact the time when you think your kids are ready for that phone? Will this data collecting influence your decision as well?

Jason:

That is certainly something I thought about actually before even giving up a cell phone. That was a, that was a big topic on my minds is the amount, the amount of data collection, data mining, the amount of personal information that is out there before giving up my phone, actually went through an exercise of de googling my, what you call online ecosystem. I guess eventually I did have to dive back in, and I guess that's the world we live in. But at the time, foregoing my Google email addresses and YouTube, I did delete all the social media accounts and going with some more privacy favored alternatives. I mean, I kind of went deep down the rabbit hole. But using browsers that have more privacy enabled feature. And installing A VPN at the modem level, you know, these are things that are certainly a little, a little scary.

Jason:

It's wild. The amounts of data they can collect on you and then what they can actually do with the data. I don't think that's talked about enough. Everyone talks about how Facebook and Instagram and everyone is collecting data, but then what they're actually doing with it, right? To manipulate your buying habits and, and purchasing things, steering you towards a, a direction to either consume things, consume objects, buy things, consume other media, or come election seasons towards rights, a maybe another ideology that's proven right. They can and have done that. These things are pretty scary to your points. I think it's certainly a maturity level to where, at least with my kids, until they can understand and really we can actually have that conversation about these things. And they can understand risks involved with everything. So whether it's data, whether it's screen time addiction, you know, the health concerns and everything with just staring at a screen for four hours straight. Right? But all of that goes back to that maturity level.

Pat:

Yeah.

Jason:

And, you know, whatever age that is.

Pat:

I do appreciate the fact that throughout this conversation, when it comes to your kids, as we talk about these smartphones, your default mechanism is always to, we'll talk about it, we'll see where they are at maturity wise, but it's a very respectful way of engaging your children as opposed to saying, well, I'm not gonna give you that phone till you're, you know, 21. You are not putting any judgment to this. You're talking about the realities of this thing in your pocket. So I think that that's a wonderful way to parent when you really engage them and allow them to think for themselves. And it's guiding, not preaching. And that's come through this whole conversation.

Jason:

Thank you. That's, that's how we're trying to, you know, trying to raise them and trying to parent, figuring it out as we go.

Pat:

As we get to the top of the hour. I wanna ask you, if someone was listening to this podcast and they're feeling trapped by their phone, but are terrified to give it up, what first step would you tell them to take maybe a slower saner, more intentional way of handling the phone and their life?

Jason:

Great question. I think it's funny you say saner. Uh, it's, uh, that's good. There are definitely steps that you can and, and should take before, I think before going the, the nuclear routes and, uh, for going your phone altogether, that's a major life changing decision, especially when work, travel and everything can be tied to it. So a couple steps you can take right away are one, leaving your phone on the table or a different table somewhere else, leaving it on the couch when you, uh, when you're going to eat a meal, right? It's dinner time. You don't even take it with you. I think, that's a one, you know, a small way, right? So that way, at least when you're sitting with a family, sitting with your significant other, at least you're engaged there when you go to bed, leaving it out.

Jason:

If you're not leaving it outside of the room, leaving it on your dresser or away from not on your nightstand because it's too easy to just reach and grab it, but somewhere where it's, you're introducing some friction, right? So you can still, if you need it for your alarm clock, I do recommend getting a physical alarm clock though, but somewhere far away so that you are not able to just reach to it while you aren't sleeping for a couple minutes and you don't get sucked into a three hour scroll session on Instagram. I think those are two very, very simple ways, uh, to introduce a little bit of reduced screen time. And beyond that you can configure screen time limits. And there are these devices, which I don't know if you've, if you've seen, which introduce even, even more friction that work with the screen time settings that, that work with the NFC, you can place it on the phone to unlock certain apps.

Pat:

What is N-F-C?

Jason:

N-F-C is "near field communication." So it's the same technology that you use when you're using your phone to pay to check out or when you're using something like Apple Pay or Google Pay, but the same type of technology when you would touch your phone to another phone to transfer info, if that makes sense. But these devices basically would not allow you to use, you can configure 'em to not allow you to use certain apps unless you have that physical device on your phone. So if you leave it at home, then you wanna be able to use, uh, or leave it in the drawer somewhere, then you wanna be able to use whatever apps that you say you, you configure you don't wanna use. So if you block off all social media, then you wanna be able to use those apps, right? So I think that's a great way.

Jason:

And then the last thing I'll say is going the weekend routes. And a lot of people do this is buying a dumb phone, you know, a flip phone or whatever, and just using it on the weekend. So if you have a, a smartphone that has a sim card, just popping it out and putting it in your flip phone for the weekend, so that way you can disengage. So you can leave the iPhone in a drawer and you have your flip phone if someone really needs to get ahold of you and call you and you can still send text messages. So you're still connected and available for the bare necessities. But that's it. And if you like that route, then you can go all in if you want

Pat:

Yeah. Well those are great ideas. Jason. Hey, I wanna thank you for joining me on filter capacity and for reminding us that life gets bigger when the screen gets smaller. Thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it,

Jason:

Pat. Thanks so much for having me.

Pat:

Hey listeners, thanks for listening. Till next time. Take care. Bye.