Anti-hacks, attention as worship, & antagonizing my enemy, the phone
A guest post by John Linford
Let's face it, all the guru advice in the world is not helping you get off your phone.
Greyscale. Time limits. Those hilarious time capsule boxes.
If you're anything like me, you get excited about every new mindfulness hack you see on Instagram. You look longingly at the advertisements for the minimalist phones. You're making good-faith attempts with every combination of tips and tricks possible. All without luck or progress. Inevitably, I (we) find myself (ourselves), once again on the phone, scrolling YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels.
Once again, reopening apps I just closed.
Once again, feeling a gaping hole in my soul as I consume stupid, cheap, addictive dopamine.
I really wish I could say that I've figured it out. That I wake up at 5am, do my morning meditation and reading, eat a healthy breakfast, and get some deep work done, all without touching my phone. I don't. But I am making progress. And I'm here to share what is working (hint: it's not another hack).
I experienced a metaphorical two-by-four-to-the-head recently around a simple sentence: "I believe that worship, fundamentally, is a matter of attention" (Reddit). I couldn’t help but think about the hours of attention I had given, especially to the various social media platforms. But now in this framing, the hours of worship.
Let me start by clarifying what I mean by worship (not trying to get preachy). As David Foster Wallace says in This is Water, "There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." This isn't about religion or dogma per se; this is about value and time. In ancient times, there would be an altar that you would approach and place sacrifice on. Whatever or wherever your altar is, you still participate in worship, and you still make sacrifices. It's just not the language our modern sensibilities jibe with. Wallace continues:
"[T]he compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive….Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.”
The result of “worshiping” my phone is pretty clear: I feel weighed down, groggy, unproductive, and ashamed. I don't know a single person that loves getting distracted by their phone. Entertained? Sure. Distracted? Absolutely. But filled? Not even close.
I like this mindset shift from attention to worship for two reasons. First, it imbues the endeavor with more purpose and meaning. I have a real sense of losing my soul when I spend too much time with fluffy entertainment. This interpretation helps me not feel crazy. Makes me feel like getting off my phone really does matter.
Second, if phone use is a simple matter of attention, that only requires the hacks and tactics I’ve tried: Do Not Disturb, time limits, placing the phone in another room etc. However, if it's about worship, we're talking about motivation, meaning, and belief. We're tapping into a force that's endured persecution, Inquisitions, and Holocausts. What steals my attention can be simple and relatively harmless. What hijacks my worship, well, that's anything but. And I don’t know about you, but it kills me knowing that it’s my own biology, psychology, and survival mechanisms that are working against me. It’s certainly not the fault of the little aluminum, glass-backed god that I so often find myself bowing over.
“Lo you now, how vainly mortal men do blame the gods! For of us they say comes evil, whereas they even of themselves, through the blindness of their own hearts, have sorrows beyond that which is ordained” (Homer, The Odyssey).
The intentional design of these devices works directly against our primal instincts. Remember Dug from the movie Up, and his cute “squirrel!” moments? That’s us, every time a post or ping or popup surfaces. We can’t help it. We’re wired for attention. And it’s slowly killing us (Shanmugasundaram et al., 2023).
So, to get off my phone, to save myself from distraction and waste, I'm turning my attention, my worship, to three principles: creating friction, embracing silence, and cultivating progression. And I can tell you, these aren’t hacks. Hacks are easy. And these practices haven’t been easy. But they’re working, ever so slowly.
First, creating friction.
If you have time to read this Substack, you're wealthy. Which means that, unlike most of everyone in human history, you're not concerned about regular threats to your person, or where your next meal is coming from. Yeah, our life can still be hard, with emotions and stressors...but we're in a different playing field than our ancestors.
Let's face it: we're comfortable. Staying in shape is not only an option, but it's actually difficult. And that reflects in our digital habits as well. Everything else is so easy, why not the next dopamine fix?
So, the first thing to learn to love is creating friction. AKA: doing the hard thing for the sake of it. Say what you will about cold plunging, CrossFit, or ultra-marathoners, but none of those crazy people need to be doing those activities to survive these days. It's 100% a choice.
But...is it that crazy?
If you asked a Stone Age woman what her opinion on cold water was, I'm sure all you'd get would be a blank stare in return. All she had was cold water.
Ask an 1800s farmer where he got his sick triceps...and he'd be confused because everyone had those. From, you know, chopping wood and chucking bales of hay.
Our daily lives don't facilitate that type of expected muscle growth, physical or mental. We have to consciously build it.
For me, I'm building my muscles in simple ways. When I reach for my phone at a stoplight, or in the grocery store line, I try to elongate the seconds; pausing for a few extra moments to drink in what's around me, and feed my soul in other ways. I love what John Mark Comer says in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: “It’s wise to regularly deny ourselves from getting what we want, whether through a practice as intense as fasting or as minor as picking the longest checkout line. That way when somebody else denies us from getting what we want, we don’t respond with anger. We’re already acclimated. We don’t have to get our way to be happy.” Have you seen the tablet kids? They’re the perfect example of anger when they don’t get their way. Yes, Comer recommends choosing the longest checkout line. Crazy. But it works.
As an aside, I've found that the "hacks" of healthy eating, regular exercise, and good sleep dramatically increase my ability to resist the pull of the phone. In this framing, I’d like to think it's because I'm learning to love friction, so my soul doesn't crave easy answers as readily. I'm now more used to doing hard things, so resisting the call of my phone becomes easier and easier.
In my estimation, moments of friction like these are the minimum required actions to take against this addictive force that has taken over our lives. And any friction created is an infinitesimal sacrifice in a life of privilege and luxury.
The second principle is embracing silence.
I'm in my fourth year of reading around 100 books per year. At this point, most of what I've read is a mish-mash of bland tidbits and regurgitated ancient wisdom. But there are a few standouts. Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise by Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz is one of them. And it continues the theme of attention as worship.
The duo starts with a quote from Simone Weil, a French philosopher: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer” (Gravity and Grace, Weil). Does it sound a little kooky? For these authors, silence is anything but. Zorn was a meditation teacher for Congress. Marz, a collaboration consultant, spent her time bridging the gap between scientists and engineers. Each has found their own peace in building silence.
Their first major idea for the book was born out of a research question: “What’s the deepest silence you’ve ever known?” There were many typical responses: sunsets at the beach, cricket chirping in the woods, or swinging in a hammock near a babbling brook. But they began to worry they’d asked the wrong question as more answers flooded in. People said their deepest silence was in the wailing of an infant at birth, finding the perfect line in their whitewater rafting expedition, or creating total flow at the 4am mark of an all-night dance party.
What Zorn and Marz found is that silence has nothing to do with noise, and everything to do with attention. In fact, it is “pristine attention” that leads to inner silence. This has massive implications for us, especially in the context of our phones. It is, in short, that we are becoming deadened to worship, at least in the definition we’ve been working with here.
A Harvard Medical School professor put it this way: “Continuous partial attention refers to the state of continuously dividing and shifting one's attention across multiple tasks or stimuli without fully immersing oneself and only partially engaging in any one of them. This practice can lead to a superficial understanding of information and a reduced ability to concentrate on any one task or piece of information. We have indeed transitioned now from the information age to the age of interruption (Firth et al., 2019)” (Shanmugasundaram et al., 2023).
Silence, then, is an opportunity to escape interruption. A chance to heal our souls. And more than our souls: researchers found that listening to silence did more to heal neurons and create brain plasticity than listening to any kind of music (Kirste et al., 2015).
Practically, embracing silence sounds like more friction: focusing on the breath, listening to the wind, or releasing yourself into sublime hyperfocus as you read, write, or run. Simple actions. I’ve seen incredible results, especially in my ability to sit and focus.
The third principle I'm turning my worship (and attention) to is cultivating progression.
My father is a world-class expert in his field. Probably top 5, though he'll modestly say he's top 10 at the most. I promise you don't know his name (he's in a niche industry). As an inorganic chemist, he specializes in surface analytics, dealing in complicated-sounding procedures such as chromatography, spectroscopy, and electron microscopy. Please don’t ask me to define any of those, I leave that to my hyper-intelligent father.
But intelligence is not why he's at the top of his game in this amazingly complex field. He’s arrived through cultivating progression. For the last two decades, he's taken about an hour a day to read, practice, or learn about fundamental topics in his field: organic chemistry, digital signal processing, and surface analysis (X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, whatever that means). Mind you, this is after his undergraduate, PhD, post-doctorate, and years spent learning in industry. He's a learning machine.
The result? He understands the basics at a higher level than any of his compatriots. That enables him to see connections that others miss.
He’s the living embodiment of Cal Newport’s thesis in Deep Work: “To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.”
By this point, I’m hoping these ideas feel familiar. Attention, worship, hard work, discipline…it really doesn’t sound sexy does it? But after spending so long in hack-land, I’m ready for real results. I’m slowly regaining my childhood ability to sit and read for hours. Writing and editing are becoming less of a chore. I’m finding I can focus for longer periods in conversations. I think it’s working.
Comer says it well: “[W]hat you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.”
Picture a slick Capital One ad to finish this off. Only instead of her sultry voice asking, 'What's in your wallet?', I'm asking you the ultimate question: what will you worship? I'm hoping you'll join me in seeking something else, anything but the 6.7 inch glowing screen you're reading this on.
Thanks for your attention.
John Linford is a professional magician, strategic alliances manager at Scan123, and the co-founder of Deckability. He loves stories, whether it’s telling them, reading them, or critiquing them.