Why beò

I'm 60. I've watched technology go from something you sought out to something you can't escape. Screens everywhere. Everyone staring at them. Everyone complaining about staring at them.

I've also spent most of my life managing a brain that doesn't work the way it's supposed to. That's given me a lot of time to think about patterns, mine and everyone else's.

What bothers me

Everyone says the same thing. "I'm on my phone too much." "I can't stop scrolling." "I feel addicted."

Fine. But here's what nobody talks about: we've killed anticipation.

Waiting for a film, months. A new album, weeks. A letter, days. Something you ordered, who knows.

Now? Instant. Everything instant. Want, have. Want, have. The gap collapsed to nothing.

We haven't reckoned with what that's done to us. We've optimised away something human and nobody's asking what we lost.

Julie

Met her online twenty years ago. We've argued about technology, psychology, how brains work, ever since.

She did an MSc, tested whether intense social media use affects selective attention. It didn't. But she also found that a widely-used smartphone usage scale couldn't predict actual phone behaviour. The instruments were broken, not the people. That landed with me.

Why this

Every digital wellbeing app starts from shame. Scary numbers. Lockouts. Treating you like you can't be trusted with your own phone.

Doesn't work. Never has. External control without understanding just makes people resentful.

So: what if you just told people the truth? Here's what you actually do. Here's the gap. Here's why. Now you decide what to do about it.

If it works, people get control back. Control of their ideas. Their breath. Time away from the constant nattering of the machine. You can hack your happiness by smelling a flower, doesn't cost anything, doesn't need an app telling you to do it. But first you have to notice you've been staring at a screen for two hours.

Julie has the research credentials. I have decades of managing a difficult brain and watching people lie to themselves about their habits. We'll see if it helps anyone.