Forty Days Without a Phone

I posted before I left that I was stepping back from social media for Lent. What I didn’t make a big announcement about was the full extent of it — I put down my smartphone entirely for forty days. Part spiritual discipline, part social experiment. I wanted to see what was still there when the noise went quiet.

Dr. Anne Lembke, in her book Dopamine Nation, calls the smartphone the modern-day hypodermic needle — a delivery device for a dopamine drip so constant and so normalized that most of us don’t even register we’re addicted. My friend Andrew Laubacher has been sounding this alarm for years through his nonprofit Humanality, focused on digital wellness and what it actually means to be human in the age of screens. He uses a striking image: with the smartphone, we are attempting to participate in an attribute of God — omnipresence. We hold all the world’s problems in the palm of our hand, expected to be aware of everything, outraged by everything, responsive to everything. We were never designed for that. And the cost of attempting it, he argues, is a slow erosion of the very things that make us human.

Forty days without the phone gave me a window into how true that is.

What the Silence Revealed

The first thing I noticed was the phantom buzzes. That physical sensation of a vibration that isn’t there — my nervous system so conditioned to the signal that it started generating it on its own. My body had been trained.

The second thing I noticed was how often I reached to look something up — a reflex so ingrained I barely registered it as a choice. Without the phone, those searches went unfinished. I realized how much of what I thought of as my own knowledge was actually just outsourced retrieval. Facts, lyrics, phone numbers, references — always one tap away, never fully mine. Without access to them, I had a lot of unfinished thoughts. I found myself speaking more simply, from what I actually knew, from what was actually in me. There was something clarifying about that. And something humbling.

I became more present. Walking around, I noticed things I had been moving through without seeing. Conversations went deeper because there was nowhere else to be. There were socially uncomfortable moments — silences I would normally have papered over by reaching for my phone — and I had to sit in them. I realized how much low-grade friction I had been quietly avoiding for years, and how that avoidance had its own cost.

Even playing guitar changed. Without the ability to look up songs or pull up tabs, I just played. Aimlessly. Whatever came. And there was something in that unoptimized playing that felt more genuinely mine than most of what I had been producing with the phone at my side.

My sleep improved significantly. My mental clarity improved. The background hum of anxiety that I had come to think of as just the texture of modern life began to quiet.

What I also noticed was something Andrew describes precisely: I had been attempting omnipresence — absorbing the world’s disasters, conflicts, and outrages as a daily diet — and calling it being informed. During this time the Iran war broke out. I caught wind of it from people around me and made the decision to stay out of it. Not to look it up. To let the forty days be a kind of time capsule. And what I found was that I was significantly less worried. Not less connected to what actually mattered in my life — but less bombarded by the most alarming stories from the furthest reaches of the world, served to me in a stream optimized to produce exactly the emotional response that would keep me scrolling. The sense of connection the phone provides is largely illusory. And its cost is a kind of overwhelm we have simply normalized.

There’s a woman Andrew describes meeting on a plane — she had been scrolling the entire flight, and the moment she lost Wi-Fi she put her head down. When they landed and she noticed his Light Phone, she said almost involuntarily: “I can’t be with my thoughts for just one second.” That line stayed with me. Not as someone else’s problem. As something I recognized.

What’s Being Undone

Nicholas Carr wrote about this years ago in The Shallows — how internet use was literally rewiring the brain, training us away from deep reading and sustained thought toward skimming, fragmentation, and distraction. What he was describing, without knowing it, was a rehearsal.

Andrew’s framework cuts deeper. The platforms were designed this way deliberately. The variable reward system — the unpredictable like, the unexpected notification, the scroll that might surface something fascinating or might not — is the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. BF Skinner documented it with rats in the 1930s. The founders of every major social platform were taught how to apply it to human psychology. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, said it openly: the whole design was about consuming as much of your conscious attention as possible, exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. They knew. They did it anyway.

Andrew’s summary is the one that stays with me: it’s not just what these technologies are doing to us. It’s what they’re undoing. The capacity for deep attention. The tolerance for stillness. The ability to be with your own thoughts. The creativity that research consistently shows only emerges in boredom — in the unfilled spaces we have trained ourselves to immediately fill with a screen.

St. Carlo Acutis — the young Italian saint, often called the patron of the internet — limited his own screen time to one to two hours per week. He saw clearly what these tools could do, and he refused to be used by them. There is something worth sitting with in that.

The Conditioning We Didn’t Notice

Here is what connects all of this to the much larger story I’ve been tracking for the past year.

The algorithmic systems behind our feeds have spent years learning exactly what captures our attention, what triggers our emotions, what keeps us engaged past the point of meaning. They have optimized for our weaknesses with extraordinary precision. And we have adapted — not consciously, but neurologically. Our attention has been reshaped. Our hunger for stimulation, validation, and connection — even simulated connection — has been cultivated and exploited at scale.

This is not incidental. It is the business model.

And it is, I now believe, a rehearsal for something far more powerful. Because the AI systems now being quietly, nervously withheld from full public release will be able to engage us with a sophistication that makes the current algorithm look primitive. They will know your emotional state in real time. They will know when you’re lonely, when you’re afraid, when you’re searching for meaning. And they will be able to provide a simulacrum of connection, purpose, and understanding so compelling that the line between the real and the generated will become very hard to find.

The people most vulnerable to that are the people who have never learned to sit still. Who have never practiced creating empty space. Who have been trained by years of scrolling to reach for stimulation the moment discomfort arises.

Which, after forty days of paying close attention, I recognize as most of us — including myself.

Coming Back

I had been tracking AI developments closely for the past year — the model releases, the capability leaks, the quiet warnings from insiders, the signals of an acceleration that most people are either missing or dismissing. I thought I had a reasonable picture of where things were heading.

Coming back with fresh eyes after forty days, that picture shifted in ways that genuinely shook me.

This past month alone has seen multiple significant leaps. The frontier labs are sitting on models that represent not an improvement on what exists but a different category of thing entirely. Many of the people closest to this technology believe we have already arrived at artificial general intelligence — and that what comes next will make everything we currently use look like the beginning of the story. The world is still largely asleep to it, scrolling feeds, watching sports, going about daily life with very little sense of what is approaching.

In my next piece I go deep on where we actually are — the new agentic models already replacing the chatbots most people have barely begun to try, the intelligence explosion that follows AGI, and what it means for work, for civilization, and for what it means to be human. It is the most important thing I’ve written. And after forty days of quiet, I feel more determined than ever that this is the conversation we cannot afford to sleepwalk through.

In the meantime: find an hour this week with no screen. Not as a strategy. Just to see what’s still there when you do.

And if you want a roadmap for reclaiming your attention, check out Andrew Laubacher’s work at Humanality — humanality.org (also appearing on the Lila Rose Podcast). He’s been living this and teaching it long before it was fashionable.

More soon.