Phone
My recent experience surrounding tech, tech people, and for a subset of the things I'll mention here also anyone under the age of 40, is the experience of meeting people who have taken the step of accepting that they are addicts and are trying, with varying success, to take further steps to recovery.
Hardly a day goes by without hearing a joke about throwing a computer into the river, or setting a phone on fire, or becoming a goose farmer (riffing on that particular guy's famous career development). A popular topic of conversation in the group chat on Sundays is Screen Time ™, after our iphones' weekly push notification reminds us of our addiction and fills us with guilt and shame; the rest of the week is riddled with the occasional phone related interjection: "I feel like shit today, too much phone" or "I need to get off this thing, bye" or "I'm on the train with 25 people and they are all on their phone" (typed while on the train, on the phone), etc.
I think it's interesting that we all hate it. It's interesting that we have apps and strategies and rules to get off the phone. I personally am doing a lot better, which I accomplished mostly by writing things by hand, getting my first wrist watch (dumb, thank you very much), and using the computer instead of the phone also for small immediate things. My justification for this last one is that the computer is less practical and therefore (?) more deliberate: I will not pull up my laptop mid-dinner to search "Konditorei etymology". It will have to wait. The classic time limit for apps that iphone offers natively is cute, I guess, but ultimately useless unless you are an incredibly determined and disciplined person, in which case you hardly need it anyway.
I think it's interesting to see that, in the face of this full blown general addiction, those of us who always enjoyed technology and were probably early adopters of the devices and apps causing it are the ones most aggressively feeling it, trying to overcome it, warning others who are probably nowhere near as deep in it as we are ourselves. I know people who work in the kind of meta-tech that is incomprehensible to 99,9% of the population and see them suffer under this philosophical (moral?) tension to the point they try to overcompensate by going practically ascetic.
I think about this a lot, partly because i see a lot more people here than I used to see back home. The public transportation system in Berlin is very good, and I use it, and I go places and I see a lot of people who also use it and go places. Among them many children, with their necks folded in terrifying 90 degree angles over their phones for the entirety of a 20-minute train ride. And when I see them I look around and I see that every adult in that train is also doing that, myself included, although our neck angles are usually not so sharp, and I think to myself this is insane, this is absolutely insane. So I stopped using my phone on the train, so that if a child looks up they can see at least one person not on their phone. Sometimes it's very boring, but that's fine. Boredom is not so bad.
I don't have anything insightful to say. I want phone addiction to be structurally acknowledged and treated as a public health issue. I also want to throw my phone into the Spree but I think I won't do that.