Creatures of Habit
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Untraining the Mind
Photo by Victor Freitas from Pexels
In 2015, when Lucy Gent Foma was getting ready to release her book, Funded, she turned her dumb phone in for a smartphone. She knew she had to go all in with social media in order to promote her book, so she learned the art of tri-platform posting and other online marketing techniques. Her phone became an important asset as she navigated this new territory.
After her book was released, she continued using her smartphone. Lucy knew that she was using her phone compulsively, but it wasn’t until she read The Unsettlers that something clicked. Readers are introduced to a no-nonsense woman who can’t stop her teens from buying tech devices with their own money. But each time she seems them on their device, she asks them a simple question:
“Are you contributing to the betterment and beauty of the world? If not, get the fuck off your device.”
Lucy tracked her phone usage and decided that using her device for social media, shopping, and banking wasn’t contributing to the betterment and beauty of the world. To make matters worse, she found that she was often short-tempered with her children because her attention was divided between them and her device. She herself had been “phubbed” by a work colleague and found the experience demoralizing; she didn’t want her children to have the same experience, thinking that a device was more important than them. As a working mom, Lucy only has about 4 hours each day to spend with her children and she wanted those hours to be quality time, not watered down by technology negatively affecting her mood.
After the 2016 election, Lucy began to feel more and more disillusioned with social media. She was disappointed in the way that social media was shaping the collective perception of reality, and she started to disengage from the digital world that she had so heartily thrown herself into in order to promote her book. (It’s a sad reality of book publishing these days that social media presence plays a big part in the process.)
When her smartphone died a watery death, Lucy decided to switch to a flip phone. “I don’t see any drawbacks of having a flip phone,” she says to me. “Only benefits.” Although group texting is impossible and texting in general is harder on a flip phone, Lucy finds that she communicates with people more by phone and email now. Also, she’s less frustrated with her kids now that she doesn’t have a smartphone stealing her time and attention.
Lucy finds social media platforms to be manipulative. “Everything I see is tailored for my exact preferences. It’s not expanding my worldview. Instead, it’s validating my existing biases and assumptions about the world.” She also doesn’t appreciate the exploitative nature of social media. “It’s all about selling stuff,” Lucy explains to me. “Just looking at my friends’ posts, I see subtle signs of marketing, branding and consumerism. It’s insidious.”
Lucy wants to be more conscious about what she consumes, but also about the ways that she engages with the world. In regards to the Black Lives Matter movement, Lucy felt compelled to contribute about her own experience as the wife of a black man and mother to black children. She found herself constantly formulating posts and thinking about what story to tell about her relationship to the BLM movement. Finally, she realized that this was all about ego. “I don’t need to seek validation or criticism on a public platform for the sake of my ego,” she says now. “I felt compelled to share, but not in this way.” She has found several ways to be a background actor in the BLM movement, working within her local government to make meaningful change.
Lucy is very aware of the way that everything we take in shapes us. Our brains are always changing and we’re not always conscious or critical of what we’re inputting into our brains. “We’re animals with compulsions,” she says. “Creatures of habit. We can be trained, whether or not we take that training into our own hands.”
Lucy strongly believes that there should be technology literacy training for young people at schools so they can learn to use their devices to the best of their ability. Adults, on the other hand, are hopeless. “Adults are the worst examples when it comes to using technology. We don’t have any training in etiquette or how to be conscious when it comes to our devices. We think we’re autonomous and above the law, but the truth is, we should never stop learning.” As for Lucy, she’s in the business of untraining compulsive tendencies from her mind and putting that energy towards her community and her family.
Tip of the Week
Like doing reps at the gym, what's one exercise you cna do daily to untrain your mind? Maybe it's waiting until after your first cup of coffee to check your phone, or cutting your screen time down by an hour, or going a day without clicking on a social media app. Pick one little thing and try to repeat it each day this week. For me, that's not checking my email on my phone. Wish me luck!
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