Can we live without our phones?

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1:00The documentary, home of the best documentaries from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm James Reynolds. This time in the documentary, it's BBC Conversations, where we bring people together to share their experiences of tech addiction, whether or not we can cope without our smartphones. How long would you last? Last month, the social media giant Meta agreed an $18 billion settlement with US states to resolve claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed children. Meta denied any wrongdoing, but agreed to implement a two-hour daily limit for teenage users across its platforms. And this week, the boss of Snapchat said that his firm would also be willing to restrict the time that teens could spend on his app. If this has got you checking your own screen time,

2:05later we'll hear from people who've chosen to do it all very differently. They don't own smartphones at all. They talk about the difference that has made to their lives. But for our first conversation, my colleague, Priya Rai, brought together three people who've found help through recovery programs for people struggling with tech addiction. Tom is in the US state of Michigan. Alex is in Vancouver, Canada. And Julia, not her real name, is on the US West Coast. I struggled with this addiction for a really long time, for well over a decade, and it actually started manifesting as a teenager. And for me, I mean, it's different for all of us, but it was games, videos, it was all kinds of things, blogs, podcasts, books, really anything that could hold my attention online. And it started out as fun. And it was only occasionally causing problems. And then, you know, by the end, it was causing problems all the time. And I was, you know, losing sleep. I was facing a lot of consequences.

3:10It's school and work. I was really getting more and more withdrawn and anxious. And yeah, I didn't understand that it was a technology addiction. I thought, you know, I wasn't managing my time well. I just had to be more responsible. But it actually was the technology. And the proof of that is that when I finally, you know, joined this community and was able to stop my life got unimaginably better in ways that I didn't understand some of my problems were connected to the addiction. Very relatable. My story is that I love internet technology growing up. It actually brought me a lot of joy for quite a while. I'm 36 now. I think there were some issues popping up, but I still enjoyed it. I had a really nasty situation like breakup in 2018. And in 2019, I discovered, oh, I'm like really addicted to technology. I think I had been addicted far before that. But that was the moment

4:11I realized it. So I went on a quest for like six years to resolve my addiction. So I did things like I did a three month dopamine detox. I would abstain from certain types of technology. And it wouldn't work. And the situation kept getting more hopeless. I got bones like suicidality. I didn't even know where it was coming from. I basically was like blaming everything else. And then in 2025, I joined the community. And things started to click for me. And my life's been getting better basically since then. Alex, tell us your story and what addiction looked like for you. Yeah, I get my first computer in 1998. And yeah, and I spent the entire summer in front of it during how to program. And then I get the internet connection. And yeah, there was so much, there are so much information so much fun to have. And kind of started like with this, just spending time on the internet and enjoying myself. And this time, I can't spend more and more

5:14time there. And after college, I broke up with my girlfriend. And for 10 years, I didn't have any girlfriend. And it just most of my relationship was through computer. And it wasn't really great. I really love my grandma. My grandma got dimension. And in the year when she got really bad, I couldn't really spend time with her because I was on my computer cycling through social networks, YouTube, Netflix. I didn't do games because games actually require some work. But everything else, yeah, social networks. By the end of it, by 2024, what it looked like is that during the work day, I would spend quite a bit of time on how can you use going to Twitter, like reading technical articles. And by the end of the day, I would switch to YouTube shorts and watch them. And then I would go to

6:16Netflix and watch a season of a show. I can't help why by them. And then I had to start my day. It sounds serious. So that was not like sustainable. I just had this feeling that like there is nothing in me that can stop it. Yeah. And that's what I went to my first meeting and really helped me. And this is when it really clicked. And I stopped doing that like called Turkey essentially. I feel more connected now to people. And it's the biggest regret of my life that I just wasted like over 20 years of my life to this. And yeah, that's me. Thank you so much for the details of all three of you have shared. I wonder how it feels talking about this out loud. It's one thing within your groups. But of course, now as well on a radio program. What is that like Tom? Oh, it's great. I love talking about this. This is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. So just being able to

7:19talk about it and narrowed out feels great. Being able to relate, being able to have people that are interested in the problem. Basically for me, these days, it's kind of difficult for me to feel joy. But I do notice that I feel joy when I am able to try to talk about this subject or help other people out. It's a lot of this like pent up energy that I finally am able to channel in a positive direction in a way that actually helps people where I don't have to act like I have to save everybody. I can just share my story. Really, that's all I'm doing is I'm just sharing my story. And it just feels good to be able to air it out and know that people are listening and that it's useful. There's a quote in a book where it says that feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. And when I talk about my experience, that's what happens for me. I would never tell a soul about this before when I was actively addicted. I couldn't even talk to my therapist about it. I thought I was being honest with people about my life, but there was this huge thing I was leaving out. I would say, oh, I just didn't sleep all night, but I wouldn't say

8:24what I had done. And the reason for that is it was deeply ashamed on some level. I couldn't even look at it for myself. But when I came into internet and technology at ex-nonymous, I started to open my mouth and actually talk about this stuff. And the reason for that is, you know, I mean, I googled technology addiction. You know, this came up and I went to a meeting. It was on Zoom. And I still remember, you know, someone there was talking about her experience, how she had taken this like exam. It was a timed exam in college. And she had started using the internet to distract herself during the exam, even though it was time limited and she had studied. And I was like, I've done that. You know, I've done all of this. People would share about all these experiences that it was like they were looking into my brains like they were staying up all night and hating themselves in the morning and, you know, feeling all shaky and zoned out all day. And I started to

9:25talk about my story too because I was emboldened by the experiences that I was hearing. And I found that these people actually had a solution. And they seem to be pretty happy with their lives, even without technology, which I couldn't imagine. So yeah, recovery has been about this honesty and openness and, you know, integrity bringing together these different parts of myself that were so hidden from each other. And I do that so that I can tell people about what has happened and tell people that there's a solution if they happen to be struggling with the same thing that I was struggling with that, you know, we can we do recover. And then it gets better. I think the good question to ask is, can you do it on your own? And I try to figure it out because these things don't work for me. And I wonder, do they work for you? Because like figuring out

10:26is like turns out not to be a solution. I can figure it out. And the question maybe is, can you? Yeah, I can answer that. No, I can't. And that is just based on my direct experience of trying to figure it out myself. And it not working for a long time. And so when I do have someone, like we, you know, someone new that comes into the ITA program, I really just, you know, as Julia said, I lead them to solutions where they're allowed to just kind of let go of the problem. And that's really what it's all about is allowing myself to be helped. That has been one of the most powerful things for me is allowing myself to be helped by other addicts and allowing myself to just reach out and find that. It seems like my brain wants to control everything. So it wants to do everything by itself. And every time I kind of fall into that mindset, I start suffering again. And then when I let go and I just sort of follow life as it's as it's happening, then I get back

11:30to Serenadeen. I will totally agree with that. And I will just say I had to get to a point where I really gave up on myself. I could no longer keep the promises that I was making to myself. I couldn't look myself in the mirror and trust the person looking back at me. But that was actually the best thing that ever happened to me, honestly, because that forced me to give up on trying to do it on my own. And it forced me to reach out. Help is out there. If you're looking for it. And I finally decided to start looking for it. And honestly, like it's not an exaggeration. It's the best decision that I ever made. And the past three years have been like every year is better than the last. Julia, Alex and Tom, listening to them, it's easy to see why screen time has become such a big talking point. Recent research by psychiatrists in Japan warned that an increasing number of children are now suffering from smartphone addiction, which they say is becoming a wider social

12:31problem. And on our live weekday program outside source, we heard from clinical psychologist and addiction therapist, Fazzle Waheed in Pakistan. The human brain has evolved to seek novelty, social approvals and social connections. And I think social media delivers all three almost simultaneously. So that's the problem. That like other addictive substances, it appeals to the reward circuit of the brain and it hides it. And the brain starts assigning more value to social media than other national pressure, but activities. You're listening to the documentary with James Reynolds from the BBC World Service.

13:37At Verbo, we understand that even the best of plans sometimes need a little support. So we plan for the plot twists. Every booking is automatically backed by our Verbo care guarantee, giving you confidence from the very start. Whenever you need help, it's ready. Before you're stay through the moments in between and after your trip. Because a great trip starts with peace of mind. And maybe a good playlist, but we've got the peace of mind part covered. Many of us rely on our phones, not just for social media, but for news, weather, banking, messaging and so on. It might now be hard to imagine life without those phones, but that is the choice of our next guests. Rahul Tandon brought together Jeffrey, a humanities

14:39professor at the University of Puerto Rico and Lauren, an artist and writer in Los Angeles. The primary reason I don't have a smartphone is time. As I'm getting older and still working, still making a living, I'm just finding it more difficult to have personal time to do what I want. I'm a block printmaking artist as well as a writer. So I teach writing classes, I teach woodcut printing and I try to do writing and printing on my own. And honestly, it's just very difficult for me to find time each day to do that. And I see what a smartphone does. It just squeezes time from your life and makes it real, real difficult. So that's prime reason number one. And prime reason number two is security. I've had a number of friends who've been scammed via their smartphone. I don't need it. So I'm choose to go without it. For me, I feel very much like Lauren, that these devices are really designed to mediate who we are, the feelings we have, the experiences

15:42that are available to us. And there's a really enormous kind of cascading impact on our minds and our consciousness. And a person like me or like Lauren are able to have our lives be more deliberate. And I think more meaningful. I was participating in the academic senate here a few years ago. And when I would come into campus like today, I'd have Monday morning. And I would see the tension on people's faces from the WhatsApp group. I don't need that in my home life over the weekend to be thinking about all these stressful things. It really allows, I think, in my professional life, into my personal life to me to design what I do and to really hold my attention on the things that I think are more, most worthwhile. Well, I tell you one thing, well, you don't have to deal with his family groups. I can see the benefits. I've not been paying on those sometimes. Lauren, on that question, though, of needing a smartphone, you had some medical tests recently. Didn't you? Was it a problem there in getting your results because you didn't have a smartphone? I mean, do you have moments where it is difficult? Yeah, that was a pain. It was, I had my yearly physical. And of course, they sent a link so I

16:46could access them via a smartphone. And since I didn't have a smartphone, I had to drive down to the doctor's office, make an appointment first and view them. And that was a pain. I'll agree. But quite honestly, I agree with Jeffrey that any advantages that the smartphone offers, I think, is outweighed by the disadvantages. My wife does have a smartphone. So when I was traveling, we used her smartphone and that made life a lot easier. So that was, I think that was one instance where I would say that a smartphone was valuable. But you know, there's a third reason I don't use smartphones. And I do think there's some kind of mass hypnosis going on in the world. You see how the world is today? I don't think anyone would disagree that there are crazy conflicts on all sides right now. And people are sort of losing their mind. And I think it all happens via the smartphone. I think it's a device that allows us to be brainwashed to a certain extent. And at the very least, I don't want to seem extreme. But at the very least, it just takes up our time.

17:49And I know that I'm impressionable. If I had a smartphone, I'd probably be wasting time just like everyone else. Can I apologize, because I made the fatal mistake of not turning my smartphone off. And it was my son calling me as you were making a very valid point. I wonder, on that point, Lauren, that idea that you have that there's good and bad, but the bad outweighs the good when it comes to smartphone. Why not just deal with the good? And we need to get better at controlling ourselves. I don't need to. I mean, if the day comes where I need to find, but thankfully, right now in my life, I don't need to. I do use a computer. So, you know, I am one of those chocolateites who, you know, resorts to email. If that's adequate, to me, why bring that into your life? There's no need. It's much like drinking wine. I mean, I think wine is wonderful. And I'm sure there are some benefits for it. But for me, I don't need it. I don't, and I'm glad I don't

18:50drink it. It's just more money in my pocket. And less time than I'm drunk. What's happening right now has a lot of similarities to what happened in the last century, with the automobile. The smartphone infrastructure has a lot of overlapse with that. The unbridled kind of adoption of car culture has destroyed landscapes, air, silence, public transit, and while enlarging. But it's the benefit. Someone argue against you that it benefits you. The economy is greatly. You have to take a country like Germany. No, but if you look at the automobile over adoption, it kind of amounts to a Chernobyl of the physical environment. And in smartphones, promised to do the same things to the mental environment, which we live in. It's really a sad time in which, you know, in the city layouts are ones you have to have a car. They're here at Borrigo and in California places like that. There's no way to not have a car. And look what's happening to the environment. And these things are all very, very damaging. And we're on the same track with respect to kind of the QR codification of all things. However, no, I do recognize that there are some very positive things. I have a colleague of mine who's a professor at the University of Connecticut. He works in the psychiatry department. And he has

19:53clients who are undergoing, or in the, for example, in psychosis. And he tells them, call me immediately on your smartphone so we can do a web chat. That can save lives. It does save lives. And you can't deny that it does. But for you, the negatives that outweigh those positive, can I just ask you both? And by the question, we've seen an example of it just now with my son calling me. Does it annoy your family, your friends sometimes? Do they can't get hold of you all the time? Lauren Fistley? Initially it did. But I mean, they know me and they love me. So they know I'm a little different. So that's fine. I mean, I find it's funny when I, when people say, what can I text you? And I always reply, I don't text. And they, they don't get that. I don't think people can process that. You know, I miss those family confabs. Believe me, we have those. And I know they're going on forever. But most, my family's pretty accepting. Sometimes when I'm dealing with new work people, they might get a little confused by it. But for the most part, it's no big deal. I mean, I think

20:55people forget that at least those of us old enough. We had lives before smartphones came into existence. And it was fine then. And I think it's fine now. I think we should treat smartphones kind of the way that we treat cigarettes and recognize that they're having it forming. They're addictive. They can encourage and cause compulsive behavior, anxiety, especially for young people. And aside from the impact of the smartphone in, for example, on classrooms, and with a constant kind of workplace interruptions, you know, I think one of the great under reported things in our time is how many traffic deaths are linked to smartphone distractions. I don't think that the numbers on that are reliable. And I think like cigarettes, smartphones could be, they become infrastructural, end-ed, which is to say that cigarette regulations have become, okay, you can use it in this space, and not in this space as long as you're far away from people. Those types of things that will be very positive as far as regulation. A lot of people would say you two are not normal. You know, some people may even use and forgive me for using this. I'm just a bit weird that you don't have a

21:57smartphone. How do you make of those comments? Because I'm sure you've had them. Yeah, I do, I get that comment a lot. And in fact, a lot of times people don't believe me. When we're at a restaurant and that there's like a QR code for the menu, I have to say you have a paper menu. They kind of look at me strangely. People do kind of think it's weird, but I think that just about everybody, if not everybody, especially my students and people appreciate it, and they can understand the value of it and what people like Lauren and I are trying to do. And you know, how I think is is a healthy thing for the broader, the most important things in our lives. I would say that yes, I agree it is weird, but what's wrong with being weird? In some ways, it's, I think it's freeing. I think what to me, what's weird is when a couple go on a date and instead of looking at each other and talking with each other, they're staring at their own phones and texting people and doing whatever the hell they're doing, that to me is weird. And I see elements of of weirdness on smartphones all the time, all the time. So to me, the over usage of

23:00smartphones is much more weird than not having one. One thing I did want to mention after Greek and Rio, which is what we're going to 2017, there was a really unprecedented apocalyptic time and the electricity was out for a lot of people around for a year, but where I live, it was three or four months. Everybody now talks about that time with certain nostalgia, even though I would not say there was anything positive about it because it was horrific and traumatic. But everyone had this experience where you came out and you got to speak to your neighbors in a way that you would never spoken to them before. One of the questions that was always asked when you see a colleague or finally you had seen for a couple of months is, what are you reading? Say you had dinner and then the sun goes down, there was a gap of time, which what do you do at that time? Everybody did the same thing, went back to the reading. And so that type of thing was really interesting. It revealed that kind of what disappears when digital connection is the default condition of everyday life. In the absence of electricity, television and internet, people turn towards each other and we start interacting again. And that was really, I think it showed me that connectivity is not human

24:01connection and that one can be a deep sense of the other. Do you think more people are going to take your path as we move forward and there's more debate over the impact of smartphone, or do you think you'll always be a bit of an outlier here? Well, I'll always be an outlier, but yes, more people will turn their back on the smartphone. But most people follow the trends. I think most people will continue to use it. I'm in Los Angeles where marijuana is legal. Once weed became legal, everybody smokes it. You can't go anywhere right now without encountering marijuana. When things become legal and available, most people just follow it without really questioning it. I agree. And I think that it's also very difficult to deny that giving up your smartphone or taking a digital break, kind of reboot your mood and approve focus and give us some calm, have better thoughts, better connections and all those things. I think that we need infrastructure that makes that not only possible, I think it makes it, that would make it necessary. One of the things that we're doing on our campus, we have this project called Techno-World

25:01Character Initiatives that really asks questions about how education can use character in digital spaces as an opportunity to develop knowledge about how disconnecting, specifically like the under title of our project is knowledge disconnected and how creating spaces be it a library that has no cell phone or some no Wi-Fi or maybe a no cell phone day on campus and these types of initiatives can kind of get people a little by little into really appreciating the importance of being offline to human lives. Jeffrey and Lauren, on the joys of life without smartphones, it does make you think of all the things you could do if you weren't simply looking down at your phone. I'm James Reynolds, you've been listening to The Documentary from the BBC World Service. Can politicians improve our economic fortunes? Dave Ramsey says no. I'm Tristan Redmond from

26:02the global story and I've been speaking to the massively popular US money guru who says if there's a financial crisis it's on us. When you borrow own credit cards and take out a $1,200 car payment or a freaking range rover, you've destroyed your life not the president. For the full interview, listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you listen.