M<\/span>y 14-year-old daughter is pretty much glued to her phone, like every other teenager we know, so I\u2019ve been taking in the news that Meta has been forced to pay out $375m (\u00a3279m) by a court in New Mexico for misleading users over the safety of its platforms for children with some interest \u2013 and some guilt, too. <\/p>\nA jury found that the tech giant \u2013 which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp \u2013 endangered children, allegations its CEO Mark Zuckerberg denies (the company now plans to appeal).<\/p>\n
As a parent of a child who uses all of these platforms (except Facebook, which I am told \u2013 with the kind of withering stare only a teenage girl can truly perfect \u2013 is for geriatrics like myself, only), my guilt centres around whether I\u2019ve done enough to protect her from their addictive algorithms.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s more than that: because I know, with a creeping sense of shame and dread, that I haven\u2019t been leading by example at home, at all. <\/p>\n
In fact, I\u2019d say that until recently it was a pretty close tie for who used their phone to scroll more: me or my daughter, despite knowing of the potential harms (such as the fact that smartphone addiction can affect our sleep, our social interactions, our emotional wellbeing and even our memory). I\u2019ve known of the risks for years, but the trouble was… I just didn\u2019t seem to be able to stop. <\/p>\n
At the tail end of last year, I\u2019ll confess I was on a \u201cdaily usage\u201d of somewhere around five hours \u2013 sometimes six. Until, that is, I discovered a secret weapon in January and cured my phone addiction overnight (and brought that daily screen time down to just two hours a day \u2013 much of which is calls, work emails and using the \u201cnotes\u201d app to write on my commute). <\/p>\n
And it was breathtakingly easy. <\/p>\n
I tried Brick \u2013 a tiny, two-inch magnet at home (which allows you to choose which apps you \u201cBrick\u201d, then doesn\u2019t let you go on them again until you physically touch your phone to the Brick device). And no, this isn\u2019t an ad for them \u2013 I bought the \u00a354 device out of my own pocket \u2013 but to say it has changed my life would be an understatement. It feels a bit like falling in love, because I can\u2019t stop talking about it. <\/p>\n
In just a few, short months, I\u2019ve kicked my addiction to scrolling idly through Insta, as well as the strange desire at midnight to find out what happened to a girl I never even spoke to at school by trawling through Facebook, plus the short-lived dopamine hit of tapping one button then watching reel after reel and story after story of friends, friends of friends, and celebrities. <\/p>\n
I now realise that I have wasted hours, even days, when I could have been reading an actual book \u2013 or getting some much-needed sleep. <\/p>\n
Thanks to Brick, I\u2019ve stopped scrolling, and I am now doing all the things I used to love doing, but hadn\u2019t found \u201ctime\u201d to do while being addicted to my phone. In fact, I\u2019ve read about 12 actual, physical paper books since the start of the year alone \u2013 and I\u2019ve saved so much money, too. <\/p>\n
Because I have \u201cBricked\u201d Amazon and Vinted, any online shopping I do has to come from physically going to, often independent, shops. It\u2019s better for my wallet, for the future of our high streets \u2013 and for the environment. And I feel better for no longer lining the bloated pockets of controversial tech giants like Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos. <\/p>\n
Sure, there will be those who say, \u201cjust stop using the apps!\u201d and who will scoff at the idea that we don\u2019t have enough willpower to do it alone; they\u2019ll ask why I didn\u2019t \u201cjust delete them\u201d (spoiler: tried that, but I just ended up downloading them again), or \u201cjust turn off your phone\u201d (when you have young children, the \u201cwhat if\u201d worry about missing calls from school makes this impossible). Yes, I could have left my phone upstairs \u2013 or downstairs when I was upstairs and I did that all of that too; but just like the tell-tale heart throbbing beneath the floorboards in the Edgar Allan Poe short story, I knew it was there. <\/em><\/p>\nThey say the first step of recovery is admitting you\u2019ve got a problem, and thanks to the false intimacy of having Insta so readily available as an app on my phone screen, I was left asking myself some pretty uncomfortable questions. Did I really just say \u201cshush\u201d to my nine-year-old son in the kitchen, because I was halfway through discovering \u201cthe truth\u201d about Nicole Kidman\u2019s \u201cbeauty secrets\u201d? <\/p>\n
Had I seriously justified being late for the school run because I simply had to find out what Lily Allen had said about her twatty ex (David Harbour), when I don\u2019t know them \u201cIRL\u201d, at all? And how is it that I know Lena Dunham\u2019s birthday (13 May) and star sign (Taurus) off the top of my head, when I\u2019m not even sure I could say the same about my cousin?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m now a born-again Brick zealot who\u2019s seen the light (and who wishes her friends would stop taking pictures of our food to post them on socials, before we are allowed to eat it). Now, with the news of Meta\u2019s fall from grace and social media bans for under-16s being seriously considered by governments across the world, I\u2019m even more grateful that I\u2019ve kicked the habit. You only need one Brick per household \u2013 so now my teenager is on it, too. <\/p>\n
Today, I can happily report that my current \u201cBricked\u201d streak is 195 hours, which would revert to 0 if I ever unbrick my phone. Before that, it was 300 hours (I had to unbrick to reply to someone on Vinted). What is curious now is how anxious I feel when I\u2019m not<\/em> \u201cBricked\u201d \u2013 there\u2019s a kind of tetchy, irritable panic that I could be sucked back into scrolling at any time. I don\u2019t like that feeling, so I\u2019m staying \u201cBricked\u201d for the foreseeable. I\u2019d rather be addicted to not<\/em> scrolling, than scrolling.<\/p>\nTo paraphrase Mary Oliver (whose poetry collection, \u201cDevotions\u201d, I\u2019ve had time to read again), what is it you want from your \u201cone, wild and precious life\u201d? I\u2019d hazard that for most of us, the answer would be \u201ctime\u201d \u2013 and Brick has bought me lots of it. <\/p>\n
Or, to be more accurate, it\u2019s given it back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it. Your support makes all the difference. Read more My 14-year-old daughter is pretty much glued to her phone, like every other teenager we know, so I\u2019ve been taking in the news that Meta has been forced to pay out $375m (\u00a3279m) by a court in New Mexico for misleading users over the safety of its platforms for children with some interest \u2013 and some guilt, too. A jury found that the tech giant \u2013 which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp \u2013 endangered children, allegations its CEO Mark Zuckerberg denies (the company now plans to appeal). As a parent of a child who uses all of these platforms (except Facebook, which I am told \u2013 with the kind of withering stare only a teenage girl can truly perfect \u2013 is for geriatrics like myself, only), my guilt centres around whether I\u2019ve done enough to protect her from their addictive algorithms. But it\u2019s more than that: because I know, with a creeping sense of shame and dread, that I haven\u2019t been leading by example at home, at all. In fact, I\u2019d say that until recently it was a pretty close tie for who used their phone to scroll more:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13680"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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