In “Day 7” of Catherine Price’s 2018 bestseller How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life, the readers—self-confessed phone addicts—are encouraged to write a goodbye letter to their phones. They’re asked to express what they appreciate, what they resent, and what they want from it moving forward, indulging in the emotional complexity of a breakup. Writing this ultimately romantic, maybe even a little kinky, letter to something that is likely your closest companion (or frenemy) helps create, like any ritual, an emotional clarity through structure. I would love to get my hands on the letters to see what the trade-off is. What I want to know is: who are we, in our secret lives, versus on our phones; what we lose, but also what we gain.
Our relationship with our phones is now so tangled, it’s impossible to tell where we end and our phones begin.
Which makes this negotiation both complicated as well as urgent. Because, at its core, it’s about how we relate to ourselves and the effort it takes to simply be, phone or no phone, in a world that never lets us disconnect.
The digital detox industry is trying to break the addiction and bring back deliberate, felt presence by helping people “reclaim their attention” and build a healthier relationship with screens. More bluntly, the reality of owning a phone, as a friend once put it, is “like carrying a cocaine machine”. Meaning, it offers unregulated hits of stimulation, always on and always available, until everything feels hyper and blurry. Yet, getting a screen management app, which limits access to apps on my phone and should land you firmly back in the world, for all its clear benefits, made me feel even more dystopian and somewhat defeated. Not only because the blockers exposed my shitty habits. But because even the battle for presence, for being in the world, has been outsourced to an optimisation tool; they sell you the poison and then the antidote. But what for and how?
Presence is what’s at stake, and much of our contemporary understanding of it is rooted in Martin Heidegger’s concept of “authentic presence”, which he explores through the notion of “being-in-the-world”. For Heidegger, genuine presence isn’t simply about occupying a physical space or moment but about an engaged, meaningful encounter with one’s environment and existence. It is the opposite of what he calls idle talk—superficial, distracted, and unreflective chatter that distances us from authentic experience, our phones being a spot-on example. But in a kind of post-Heideggerian world, where the lines between connected and disconnected are fuzzy and the burden of self-regulation runs high, authentic presence starts to feel less like a state, and more like something we’re constantly chasing.
So while the chase is on, the threats are real, and the apps are plentiful: Freedom, ScreenZen, Taskfulness (ouch!), StayFree, Jomo, Opal, Roots, Be Grounded. Forest, for instance, rewards you with a digital tree that turns into a real one; that is unless you break focus and log on, in which case the tree dies. Another app makes you deposit real money as a deterrent. If you go online, you lose it. From names to design, the user experience casts these apps as ambassadors of modern mindfulness. They sell a vision that feels natural rather than technological, but is ultimately—and in the spirit of capitalism—rooted in personal resourcefulness and self-restraint.
The apps’ mechanisms borrow from ritual tropes. They’re cyclical, require sacrifice, demand intention, create a cultural narrative for the experience, and even offer redemption. Such mechanisms are deliberate and help not just manage behaviours but also injects a more existential significance to the process. Victor Turner, a British cultural anthropologist writing in the 1960s and 70s, showed that rituals create a liminal space—an in-between zone where everyday rules and social structures pause, allowing transformation and personal change.
Detox software, through its design, acts as this liminal agent: a symbolic break from constant connectivity that offers a chance to reclaim presence and reshape the self.
But, at the same time, rituals have also served as mechanisms of social control. In that tradition, screen management apps regulate behaviour and fold resistance back into systems that profit from managing our attention.
And so between using apps and consciously limiting using apps, we’re stuck in a disconnect/reconnect closed circuit, not just practically but also existentially. In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher argues that capitalism doesn’t just shape what we buy, but rather, it shapes what we can imagine. Even resistance gets absorbed into the system, like when our frustrations or genuine, deep issues with a hyperconnected reality are quickly turned into content, apps, and products. Feeling burnt out? There’s a subscription for that. Need to reset? Try a detox retreat, maybe a mindful screen cover, or a productivity software.
But the motivation to reboot our relationship with screens is self-managed and can be what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the performance of presence. In The Burnout Society, he argues that today’s pressure isn’t just to be productive—it’s to be good at being ourselves. So, self-care becomes a job while presence becomes a skill. Detoxing isn’t just about switching off. It’s about doing it properly and beautifully, with intentions, and the success of that also reflects if we’re good at being a person. And that pressure doesn’t feel all that different from the one we’re trying to escape.
Back in real life and in an attempt to limit idle talk and be (present), I download an app which divides my day into sessions: Morning Time, Work Time/Deep Focus, then a three-hour pause for an apps free-for-all, and then back to Zen Den, to finally wind down to Good Sleep, Good Life, and start again. On Sundays, I sometimes activate the Digital Sabbath—meaning no access to apps at all. I’m on quite an extreme plan here, but I dream big. I want my attention back. I want to be mindful. I want my life back! And while the names of the sessions make me sweat, I want to, as promised, recalibrate my life.
The list of the apps I’m blocking is growing—and now includes Instagram, Vinted, Facebook, LinkedIn (I know, tragic), and, more recently, Gmail. Yes, when I had nothing left to scroll, I was browsing my emails—a typical loop of addiction. Yet, the ritual of blocking comes with rewards meant to support not just focus but transformation: motivational quotes, trophies, badges. It’s encouraged to think about the commitment to the plan as a personal success that extends beyond the screen. In reality, the narrative of personal growth feels so simple it might as well be designed to be ignored.
On a personal, practical level, the mechanism is working; the time spent on my phone has decreased. But while effective, at the same time it feels performative, because a part of having the apps is identifying ways to cheat them. The experience is shared by everyone I talked to, and there are even multiple Reddit threads that instruct on how to hack the blocks best. My friend, who pays a handsome annual subscription for her app-blocking app, has not been able to use it in months. “Since I jailbroke my way out of it, if I want to get it set up again, I have to jailbreak my way back into it”, she told me.
In my case, the break out techniques are not very elaborate, and so, my new daily rituals that replaced scrolling include waiting fifteen to 120 seconds at a time staring at interface messaging to be permitted to scroll again for a limited time. While waiting, you’re shown a world without phones, meant to (a) yank you out of screen trance, (b) remind you of your noble pursuit, and (c) bring back the sense of horror around phone addiction. The prompts can be calming: “Just Breathe In (pause) Just Breathe Out” (making me feel like things have really gone downhill if a phone needs to remind me to do that). They can also be energising and motivational: “Charge Up, Instagram Down”; or curious like this haiku:
“Mind tuned to the task,
Concentration fuels progress,
Goals become reality”.
The accompanying visuals include spirited (penguins, grass, space) but also really intense or simply strange (someone is moaning in pain with their eyes rolling back in their head) images. And it’s all to regain temporary access to my apps. I have now built enough perseverance to ignore this mindful universe and get between one and fifteen “permitted” minutes to scroll within my blocking sessions before the apps lock on me again. As a sum, each month I claim a lot of time back, but I also now waste time waiting to hack the system and unblock the apps—but, still, as a total sum, it’s a win, unless you need to jailbreak back into it.
This pull towards detox is often framed and experienced as a personal failing, because it means we’re distracted, anxious, not grounded enough. Sociologist Richard Sennett argues it’s cultural. In The Fall of Public Man, he traces how modern life has hollowed out collective rituals and public life, replacing them with therapeutic self-focus. We no longer find meaning in shared rhythms or civic belonging; instead, we turn inward, trying to process the world through our individual selves, and we hold ourselves accountable if we fail. Digital detoxing mirrors this turn. It’s not a collective act, but a private recalibration—a solo, gamified attempt to mend something bigger than us. Feeling overwhelmed by systems, we retreat into self-care. But our answer is to optimise ourselves in this private game rather than challenging the conditions that made us so scattered in the first place.
I shared advice from How to Break Up with Your Phone with my friend. The reader is asked to look at their phone and say, “It’s not you, it’s me”. My friend said: “Imagine all the people eager for my communication, not knowing I’ve said ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ to my phone”. So, that’s guaranteed to make you feel silly and might be just cathartic enough to actually want to make you break up with your phone. But if it doesn’t, maybe we should take it further with, “Please, delete my number”, now that the medium is no longer the message.
Because the phone isn’t just the channel for communication anymore; but the whole performance through which the self is shaped, rehearsed, and styled.
The real question isn’t whether we’re winning, but what presence even means when we’re this good at pretending to get a grip on having it.
