I pick up my phone to check the time and put it down forty minutes later, having decided I need four things I had never heard of. None of them existed for me before I opened the app. The phone introduced us, we hit it off, and that is the part that worries me.
There is a verse in the Bhagwad Gita that could have been written about your phone, except it has been around a few thousand years longer than the phone. In 6.24, Krishna tells Arjuna to drop the desires born of sankalpa, all of them, and to keep the senses in check from every side.
Sankalpa is a tricky word. The simplest way I can put it is the wanting, your own mind cooks up. An empty stomach makes you hungry for real. Sankalpa is the hunger you get a few seconds after your mind shows you a photo of a sandwich.
The way I use this is as a sorting job, and I picture two bins. Everything I catch myself wanting on my phone goes into one of them, and the trick is sorting quickly. The first bin holds the wanting I brought in with me, the work I have to do, the person I need to call, and the thing I actually opened the phone for. The second bin holds everything the feed handed me while I was busy, a holiday I had no plans to take, a flatter stomach I was fine without an hour ago, a milestone that made mine look small. The second bin is sankalpa. It came from a screen that gets paid every time I want something.
The verse wants me to do this sorting while I am still scrolling, live, and to empty the second bin completely. Nobody is asking me to throw my phone in the sea, which is a relief, because I would miss it within the hour. The catch is the rest of the verse, the bit about holding the senses steady from every side at once. The feed gets this better than I do, so it comes at me from all angles. A notification from the top, an autoplay from the side, a little red number winking from the corner. You can guard one door and still lose the other three.
So now I ask myself one question every time I notice I want something I found on my phone. Did I bring this wanting in with me, or did the feed just hand it to me? Mostly, the honest answer is the second one, and saying it out loud takes a lot of the fun out of it for the algorithm.
I have not cracked this. I am typing this on the very phone that gets me most mornings, by the time I have had my morning tea. The question helps anyway, and the verse is older and wiser than the very clever people in California who designed the thing to be this hard to put down.
What is the last thing you wanted only because your phone showed it to you? And did you still want it an hour after you put the phone down?