i recently signed up to try the Opal app for which I’d seen many ads on my Instagram feed. The app essentially puts your own smartphone into parental guidance mode, and lets you lock yourself out of social media (or any other) apps for blocks of time. I had found that I was spending more time scrolling on Instagram than I wanted to, and this seemed like a good way to slow down and think more deliberately about how I’m spending my time.
Today a friend linked to an article – the state of the culture in 2024 – its thesis was that increasingly fragmented attention spans have led to something called anhedonia (the inability to enjoy an experience designed for pleasure) that seems to have been caused by the level of lock-in that we have to our devices, and to our social media apps in particular.