The Gate, the Sim Check, and the Phone
On attention, the architecture of distraction, and the modern obstacles to finishing a thought.
I have a mildly embarrassing admission.
Whenever I have a task to do that isn’t especially interesting — studying for a simulator check, fixing the gate, waiting for something to finish — I reach for my phone.
Not for any specific reason. Not to check anything in particular. Simply because the task at hand is dull and the phone is not.
A YouTube search for how to fix a gate is a perfectly reasonable beginning. What is slightly harder to explain is how, forty minutes later, I have watched three videos about stray dogs finding their forever homes and acquired a new recipe for buffalo wings that I will probably never get round to making. The dogs are, I’m pleased to report, in excellent hands. The gate only took five minutes to fix, when I eventually got round to doing it.
I don’t consider this a character flaw. It is, however, a problem. And it is a problem I didn’t have twenty years ago, because the phone wasn’t there yet.
That’s not to say procrastination didn’t exist twenty years ago. Books, computer games, making a cup of tea, and going to the shops because we’d run out of biscuits for the tea were all popular techniques — but they did require some deliberate effort. The smartphone doesn’t even require that.
It was always the sim check
The simulator revision was, by far, my least favourite reading I regularly encountered. Familiar material, procedural detail, information I’d largely processed many times before — all requiring close attention again because the changes were usually small and the consequences of missing them were not.
The mind, in such a situation, had a well-established response: it would drift.
In the direction of whatever was marginally more interesting. Planning something. Thinking about the weekend. Even just staring at a point in the middle distance with the expression of someone who has lost a thought and is politely waiting for it to come back.
This happened reliably. What happened less reliably was the thinking I was supposed to be doing instead.
The difference between then and now is not the drift. The drift is ancient — the brain is wired to orient toward novelty, sudden change, and anything that might be socially relevant. For most of human history this was useful, occasionally life-saving, and there wasn’t much to drift into that wasn’t also genuinely worth attending to. The difference now is where the drift ends up: into a device that has been specifically designed to match exactly what the brain is already wired to find compelling.
Twenty years ago, it went into daydreaming. Harmless, private, occasionally useful.
Now it goes into a phone.
And that, I can’t help feeling, is a substantially different destination.
Is social media actually addictive?
I started wondering about this after the YouTube gate fixing incident. It felt like it deserved some kind of explanation beyond “I am apparently very interested in stray dogs.”
What I found was that social media platforms are not accidentally compelling. The many features that make them hard to put down — the infinite scroll, the variable reward of notifications, the algorithmic feed that always has something slightly more interesting, and usually aligned with your views, just below the current thing — were apparently designed deliberately to produce that effect. The variable reward schedule, where you don’t know whether the next scroll will produce something interesting or not, turns out to be the same mechanism that makes slot machines effective. The notification badge triggers a dopamine response. None of this is coincidence. It is engineering.
Which explained quite a lot.
The phone is winning against your willpower because it is recruiting a biological system that was not designed for modern technology.
This does not make anyone a victim. It does, however, make the playing field uneven — and it suggests that the solution is probably not simply trying harder.
Apparently the average adult in the UK spends somewhere around three to four hours per day on their phone. Much of this time was not planned. It arrived in the gaps — waiting for the kettle, sitting in the car for two minutes, the time between putting something down and picking something else up. Small gaps that used to contain small thoughts, now containing someone else’s content.
What this quietly costs
I noticed that reading something difficult seemed harder than I expected — requiring more effort than the same kind of reading used to. The ability to concentrate seems to deteriorate in the same way sleep debt accumulates: slowly, invisibly, and only noticeably once you stop and look at the balance.
Long-form reading takes concentration of a specific kind. You need to be able to follow a sustained argument, hold earlier chapters in mind while reading later ones, make connections between ideas that are separated by many pages. This kind of reading requires you to stay with something that isn’t constantly rewarding you with novelty.
There was a recommendation for the book A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel — via Anthony Scaramucci on a podcast — and I have started it four times. Not because it isn’t well written — it is, and it is, for a book about investing, surprisingly funny. I’ve struggled because investing and the language of investing is not something I naturally engage with. Unlike, as previously noted, buffalo wings recipes. The book is currently on the Kindle app on my iPad, which also contains every social media platform I have just spent three paragraphs describing.
Social media is the opposite of long-form reading. Every scroll delivers something new. The reward comes faster and more reliably than any book can manage. The brain, exposed to this long enough, begins to find the book’s slower rhythms unsatisfying. Not because the book has changed. Because the brain now compares the experience with something else.
Then there’s the question of what we say before we’ve thought it.
Social media lets us respond at the speed of reaction rather than reflection. The considered comment — the one that acknowledges complexity, qualifies its certainty, or waits a day — has become a luxury. The conversation would have moved on.
In a face-to-face conversation, immediate feedback (a raised eyebrow, a pause) lets you recalibrate mid-sentence. Social media offers no such mechanism. You post into silence and discover the consequences later — often when it’s too late.
The under-16 ban — and a similar question
While I was thinking about all this, the UK government announced restrictions on social media access for under-sixteens (following Australia). My first response: it seemed reasonable. The studies support the instinct that less face-to-face contact and more time on platforms is taking a toll on mental health — and the platforms have shown little appetite for addressing it themselves.
My second response: check my own screen time.
I don’t think I’ll be sharing the number.
What I will say is that the problems being addressed in teenagers feel very similar to the problems in the rest of us. The adults most vocally in favour of the ban might find a similar exercise instructive. The ban may benefit the next generation, but it does nothing for the generation already shaped by these platforms.
The real issue isn’t age; it’s the destination of the drift. For a teenager and an adult, the pull is the same: a device designed to match what the brain already finds compelling.
Thinking on paper
There is an older technology that I hear is useful.
Writing things down. Not typing — writing. Pen, paper, the physical commitment of putting something on a page. I haven’t fully converted to this yet, but I understand the argument — and I like the fact that committing to it would involve a visit to a stationery shop. A written thought requires a pace that matches thinking. It slows the idea down enough to examine it before committing to it.
What I do instead is think. Not at a desk with a notepad — just at some point before publishing, some consideration takes place. The blog itself is a version of this — an attempt to write things that require a sustained argument, a considered structure, and the attention that comes from knowing the thought will be read rather than scrolled past, weighed carefully rather than reacted to. Then it gets revised. Then tweaked. Then micro-polished, usually just as I’m about to head off to bed, when a better word arrives. The thinking carries on because the medium allows it. Unlike a physical book, which is fixed the moment it goes to print, the blog is permanently in conversation with itself. This is either a feature or a sign of someone who needs to do some more of that living well I keep mentioning. I haven’t decided which.
It is, in the context of how most content is currently produced and consumed, quite a strange thing to be doing.
The comment left in thirty seconds. The opinion shared before it’s fully formed. The response fired at the speed of reaction rather than reflection. None of these are considered writing. They are the written equivalent of scrolling — fast, immediate, and largely someone else’s thoughts dressed in your name.
I’m not sure I always get the thought right. But I try to think first.
Which may be the starting point of a proper conversation.
What I’m actually doing
Noticing when I reach for the phone. Not always stopping — but noticing. There is a meaningful difference between a conscious decision to look at something and the unconscious drift toward it because the task at hand is dull.
Putting the phone out of reach when I’m trying to write. This is not a sophisticated system. It is effective in approximately the way that removing the biscuits from the kitchen is effective: the obstacle doesn’t make the impulse disappear, but it does require enough effort to interrupt the automatic version of it.
Reading books that require something of me. Slowly. Without picking up the phone every time the chapter gets demanding.
Writing here, which forces a different kind of attention than I’d bring to a comment or a caption.
We all have a gate.
What strikes me most is not that the phone distracts me.
It’s that distraction now arrives pre-packaged, personalised, infinitely available, and can be engaged with on autopilot.
Daydreaming used to leave me with my own thoughts.
Scrolling leaves me with somebody else’s.
