Escaping The Smooth World

A Difficult Year: Part I

As of today, my journey to make my life harder is underway. I’ve been thrilled at all the positive responses the intro for the project got and hope you all enjoy what’s coming. This month, my focus will be on a familiar foe: Social Media and Smart Phones.

For each month of the project, I’ll be starting with a tone setting piece like this one explaining why I think the thing I’m abstaining from is part of the problem and how I plan to go about that month’s abstention. Then as the month goes on, I’ll be following it up with pieces on any obstacles I encounter or thematically relevant thoughts the process knocks loose. Enjoy!

The Smooth World is a series of promises.

You can drive anywhere.

You can have anything.

You can stay inside as long as you want.

It’s a state of mind, a lens through which we filter reality. It makes us feel powerful and if you spend enough time there, it tricks you into thinking that being able to predict an outcome means that you’ve influenced it¹. It’s the endgame of American consumerism: a bubble of convenience we use to hide from the abject powerlessness of modern life. In exchange for access to this bubble, we give our time, our money, and our tacit agreement to not think too hard about where all this convenience comes from.

But dinner doesn’t just appear on your front door. If you want food, someone has to make it. If you aren’t willing to pick it up, someone else has to bring it to you. All the seamless conveniences of the tech-enabled world are like this, a series of actions taken by a (probably underpaid) individual using (probably flawed) apps to fulfill the (often unspoken) desires of a stranger. So what happens when the Smooth World slips up? What happens when that bubble of convenience is briefly penetrated by reality?

That’s easy. You look at your phone.

For a society that relentlessly mocked fidget spinners nearly a decade ago, phones have come to serve largely the same purpose. What once was an organizational or social device is now primarily a tool for avoidance. When we are left with a spare moment of boredom or discomfort, we pour short form videos into it until every bit of air has been filled. Whether you’re waiting in line or dealing with customer service, you can count on 2026’s lineup of fully TikTokified social media apps to provide you with bespoke content to fill the time.

Phones are the great pacifying device of our time. No single human invention has ever been so capable of transmuting raw emotion into useless things. Great ideas become middling posts. Friendships become group chats. Political fervor becomes shareable infographics. Their greatest trick of all is turning time into less time.

They are the crucial ingredient that allowed for the Smooth World’s formation, an anesthetic that can be poured on every wound. Our phones and the endless scrolls of social media they provide are perfectly designed to maintain a baseline level of addicted malaise, a promise that if you just scroll a little more, you’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for.

The problem with phones isn’t just that they’re bad for us² , it’s that they make us feel too good. Looking at your phone feels better than nearly any activity you’d otherwise be doing. There is no small, quiet, moment of our lives we won’t joyously skip over given the chance. It’s like we learned nothing from Adam Sandler’s Click.

There will be no completing this project while my phone still exists to soothe the discomfort I’m trying to induce. That’s why it has to be first to go. Luckily, I have some experience.

Last spring, in my series “Dumb Phone Diaries,” I went through the process of shopping for and purchasing a dumb phone. Unfortunately, in the intervening months, not only did the dumb phone I bought stop working, but I also had a child. Suddenly, having two phone numbers felt a hair overindulgent. I thought I was out of luck and stuck with my iPhone until a friend of mine bought a Brick³. The device is a small plastic square that magnetically sticks to your fridge and can block you out of a hand selected list of apps on your phone.

This is particularly appealing to me as the reason I (and many of the people I talked to in the comments of the Dumb Phone Diaries) can’t ever fully ditch my smart phone is that I need certain apps for my work. My ability to completely block access to all social media apps while still being able to see Slack and retrieve authentication codes has been a huge boon to my ability to fully commit to a less phone-focused lifestyle. While I’m a little bummed to still not have an answer to eliminating the glowing rectangular screen from my life, I think this is a promising start.

But, it’s not just the phone that’s the problem. Social media apps are built to seize your attention no matter what you access them from. While it’s not as portable, desktop Reddit is just as capable of stealing two hours of your time as phone Reddit. So I downloaded Cold Turkey Blocker⁴ and created a 24 hour block for some of my top timewasting offenders. Unlike my phone, I’ve given myself a daily allowance of 45 minutes on desktop. This is primarily because I get most of my news from journalists I follow on Bluesky, promote my work on Instagram, and use Reddit to get tips on my film photography. I think one small window of desktop-only access to these sites is unlikely to be the root of modern misery, but I also plan to keep a close eye on this. My phone remains a zero tolerance zone as I’d like to live in a world where I forget I have it unless I’m making a call.

So with these two programs in place to keep me honest, I can move forward into January knowing that I’ll have to face each moment out in the world with my head held high and my hands unoccupied. I’ll be checking back in before the end of the month with how it’s gone.

1. This is similar to that viral video of the guy pretending to push the train or when you give a baby a toy steering wheel so they can think that they’re driving.

2. Though increases in incidences of teenage mental illness, distracted driving deaths, and radicalizing misinformation certainly do point that way

3. I have no financial affiliation of any kind with this company and recommend it solely based off of personal use.

4. Same as above, zero affiliation.