Alan Levinovitz in The Hedgehog Review:
Screentime limits. Dinner table lockboxes. Minimalist devices. There’s no shortage of creative fixes for our broken relationship to smartphones. Consumption is the enemy, restriction is the solution, and new habits are the promised result. The goal? A more productive life, free from useless scrolling and hollow social media.
Unfortunately, this approach has serious drawbacks. Like a traditional diet, it requires endless vigilance and it pathologizes the target of restriction. More importantly, the goal reinforces the same values that tether us to our phones in the first place: productivity and utility.
As a professor of classical Chinese thought who has struggled with my devices, I follow a different approach inspired by Confucianism and Daoism.
More here.