📱 Why We Can’t Let Go

A Phenomenological Look at the Smartphone’s Grip

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In a quiet Brooklyn apartment, a lawyer starts his day. He slips a small black rectangle into his pocket. No apps. No internet. Just calls and texts. A dumbphone in a city wired for speed.¹ While most people reach for a screen before their eyes adjust to the light, his choice feels like it belongs to another era. But he isn’t rejecting technology. He’s choosing something else: clarity in how he perceives the world, presence in how he relates to others, and freedom from the emotional tether of the smartphone experience.

For most people, leaving the smartphone behind isn’t just inconvenient. It feels like stepping out of sync with the world. To leave it behind is to step out of the shared, internet-driven experience that shapes how we connect, communicate, and stay oriented in daily life. The smartphone has proven to be more than a device. It’s a companion, a mirror, a memory vault.² It shapes how we move through time, how we relate to others, and how we understand ourselves. Letting it go means rewriting the rhythm of our lives.

Today we’re looking at the smartphone through a phenomenological lens. That might sound academic, but it’s simple. Instead of asking what a thing is, we ask how it shows up in our lived experience. When we apply that lens to smartphones, the picture tends to shift from a useful object to an emotionally and existentially comforting gadget. One that regulates our moods, structures our days, and offers a sense of control in a world that feels chaotic. For some, it becomes a part of their identity. Perhaps you can relate. Let us begin.

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

Built to Reshape Us

Let’s begin by recognizing that smartphones are no longer just tools. Between 2008 and 2013, they were treated as accessories that were helpful but not essential. That changed over the last decade. Today, they sit at the center of daily life. From accessing concert tickets to replying to emails, their constant presence and knack for distraction keep us reaching, unlocking, and scrolling. These gestures are so deeply ingrained they shape how we engage with space and time. Or am I the only one who’s opened Instagram “just for a minute” and looked up to find two hours gone?

Researchers have begun to trace the shift from tool to something that blends into our sense of self. A 2022 study in Current Psychology found that when people imagined using their smartphones, they perceived their forearms as longer, as if the device had become part of their body.³ In another test, participants responded faster to images of phones held in hand than to other everyday objects. Their findings suggest the brain treats the phone more like a limb than a tool. None of this is incidental. It reflects years of intentional design.⁴

By creating a device useful across every domain of life, tech companies built an extension of our memory, our vision, and our sense of place. It stores phone numbers we no longer memorize, captures evidence admissible in court, and pings our location without asking us to hold a map in mind. Its thirst for attention does not simply interrupt our thoughts. It redirects them. And while doing so, it reshapes our perception: what we notice, what we ignore, and how we interpret the world around us.

This reconfiguration of self reaches beyond physical perception. It touches our relationships, our sense of presence, and the way we inhabit shared spaces. As the phone takes hold of our attention, it also mediates how we show up for others. What began as a tool for connection now complicates it. Phenomenology teaches that perception is shaped by the structures through which we engage the world. When the smartphone becomes that structure, it alters the conditions of experience. We do not simply use the phone to see. We see through it.

Photo by Eaters Collective on Unsplash

Presence and Absence

The second domain reshaped by the smartphone is the quality of our presence. For those who live with the device in hand, the change is visible in how they inhabit space, relate to others, and register the moment. Smartphones connect us to people across the globe while creating distance from those beside us, producing an emotional terrain where connection and disconnection coexist.

This tension is reflected in the experience of Logan Lane and the early members of the Luddite Club.⁵ As the attention economy pushed them toward digitally mediated lives, they made a conscious decision to gather in person. Their decision was not symbolic, but a direct response to a felt loss: the ability to be fully present. Research supports their instincts. Even when a smartphone is silent and face down, its mere presence can impair attention and working memory.⁶ The effect carries into relationships, where studies show that a visible phone reduces empathy and weakens connection.⁷ By choosing flip phones, shared books, and face-to-face conversation, the Luddite teens built a space where presence could be protected and attention could begin to heal.

August Lamm

offers another example. As an Instagram art influencer, she used the platform for income, visibility, and connection, mirroring a broader cultural pattern that many artists now critique. Contemporary works depict screen‑bound figures, sculptures of discarded devices, and murals of “smartphone zombies” as commentary on the compulsion to stay visible online.⁸ Social media, after all, blurs the boundary between personal and professional life, offering artists like Lamm a career while eroding attention and autonomy. In 2022, when she was locked out of her account for several months, the consequences were swift: financial instability, social isolation, and the realization that her identity had merged with a platform she did not control. “Online I was a public figure; offline I was anonymous, adrift,” she wrote.⁹ Her story reflects research showing that smartphones diminish in‑person engagement and fragment workplace attention¹⁰, where even seconds‑long interruptions can derail focus, raise error rates, and cut productivity.¹¹

Over time, these effects become ambient. The phone remains present, we become absent. Its capacities are ready to fill silence, to soften loneliness, to divert attention. It serves as both buffer and shield, warding off awkwardness and vulnerability alike. Phenomenology reminds us that presence is not static but a lived practice, shaped by the tools and rhythms that direct our attention. When that practice is ceded to a device, we alter not only how we see the world but how we inhabit it. How much of that autonomy are we willing to surrender?

Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash

Anxiety and Existential Security

Our final phenomenon in this smartphone exploration is its quiet restraint on our capacity to grow into our fullest potential. At its core, the device offers a form of existential comfort: companion in solitude, diversion in boredom, balm in anxiety. Always available, always responsive, it lends a sense of control in an unpredictable world. Research from UC Irvine suggests that even its silent presence can lower stress hormones during moments of social exclusion.¹²

Yet this same comfort can carry a hidden cost. By smoothing over discomfort and rescuing us from small moments of uncertainty, the smartphone can dull the very frictions that prompt adaptation and growth.¹³ Micro‑struggles like navigating awkward silences, enduring boredom, or sitting with our own thought are not empty spaces to be filled, but thresholds where resilience is formed. When the device is always at hand, these barriers become bypassed.¹⁴ The result is not just missed opportunities for learning, but a gradual weakening of our capacity to tolerate and make meaning from life’s unpredictability.

From a phenomenological standpoint, such avoidance narrows our horizon of possibility. The phone’s glow fixes itself in the foreground, compressing the space where other ways of being might take shape. We no longer meet the world in its full complexity, but through a mediated frame built to preempt discomfort. In trading uncertainty for ease, we secure ourselves at the cost of a deeper encounter with our own lives. We should ask ourselves: What capacities might surface if we reclaimed those unfilled moments and let uncertainty work upon us?

Conclusion

Thus, here we are. Why can’t we let go? Perhaps because the smartphone has become an extension of ourselves, our presence, our livelihood, and our conduit to the outside world. Or perhaps it is the deeper pull toward comfort, choosing to be lulled by an endless stream of information rather than shaped by the frictions that foster growth. But when we accept that bargain, we risk inhabiting a simulation of life rather than life itself.

Phenomenology reminds us that life is not something to be mediated but inhabited. Whether that means replacing a smartphone with a dumbphone or setting deliberate boundaries around its use, the aim is the same: to reclaim the capacity to meet the world directly, without filtering it through the rectangle in our pocket. The choice is ours: to hold the device, or to hold our lives.

1. Sapozhnikov, B. (2023). Dumb Phone [Short Documentary].

2. “Andy Clark on The Extended Mind.” Philosophy Bites, hosted by Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds, 18 March 2017. https://philosophybites.com/podcast/andy-clark-on-the-extended-mind/

3. Lin, Y., Liu, Q., Qi, D., Zhang, J., & Ding, Z. (2022). Smartphone embodiment: The effect of smartphone use on body representation. Current Psychology, 42, 26356–26374. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-022-03740-5

4. Sustainalytics. (2019, July 16). The role of technology companies in technology addiction. Sustainalytics. https://www.sustainalytics.com/esg-research/resource/investors-esg-blog/the-role-of-technology-companies-in-technology-addiction

BBC News. (2018, July 3). Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959

5. New York Times. (2022, December 15). ‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html

6. Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140–154. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/691462

7. Przybylski, A. K., & Weinstein, N. (2013). Can you connect with me now? How the presence of mobile communication technology influences face-to-face conversation quality. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30(3), 237–246. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0265407512453827

8. NeuroLaunch Editorial Team. (2024, September 13). Exploring phone addiction through art. NeuroLaunch. https://neurolaunch.com/phone-addiction-art/

9. Lamm, A. (2025, February 1). How I quit smartphone addiction. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/opinion/how-quit-smartphone-addiction.html

10. Patrick, W. L. (2018, July 30). How your cell phone habits impact your productivity. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/201807/how-your-cell-phone-habits-impact-your-productivity

11. Sharmandemola, F., Halvani, G., Jambarsang, S., & Mehrparvar, A. H. (2023). Effect of mobile phone use on attention, reaction time and working memory of office workers. International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics. https://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticle.php?artid=135466

12. Harriman, P. (2018, August 8). Smartphones act as digital security blankets in stressful social situations. University of California. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/smartphones-act-digital-security-blankets-stressful-social-situations

13. Hao, Z., Jin, L., Huang, J., Akram, H. R., & Cui, Q. (2023). Resilience and problematic smartphone use: A moderated mediation model. BMC Psychiatry, 23, 36. https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-023-04541-1

14. Lench, H. (2024, April 3). How to embrace boredom for deep work and focus. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-emotional-toolkit/202403/how-to-embrace-boredom-for-deep-work-and-focus