The Phone Is Addicted to You

You’ve been told the story backward

Source: Andrew Guan

We’ve been told that we’re addicted to our phones. We can’t stop scrolling, can’t stand silence, can’t go a few minutes without checking the six hundred and sixteen apps we carry around. We can’t read or relate, or rest. We can’t escape the curse of abundant entertainment. We are, in short, little more than human remains. For a long time, I’ve believed this to be unquestionably true.

But lately I’ve been thinking—yes, it’s still legal not to outsource it to AI—and I’ve concluded that this story doesn’t make any sense: what addicts try to do is get closer to what feeds them, and yet, most people I know are trying, however clumsily, to get away.

Consider my example: I hide the phone when I’m working (I don’t remember where it is right now, I’m on my laptop), I delete one new app every week (last week it was ChatGPT; Gemini 3 Pro is better), I have no social media except Substack and Twitter, arguably the least invasive (never had TikTok, deleted Instagram in 2014). This is not the standard behavior of an addict, right? And it’s not just me; young people build rituals of resistance, like digital sabbaths, grayscale screens, bedtime bans, and those brick thingies that I don’t really understand (and, at this point, I’m too afraid to ask).

What I see is this: We hope to reclaim a fraction of peace against an overwhelming force, like navigating a tsunami or flying through a hurricane; it doesn’t look like addiction to me, but escape.

Meanwhile, technology moves in the opposite direction. It’s constantly learning to close the distance—from the dumb algorithmic feed that Facebook engineers built in the company’s early days, ranking posts by likes and shares, to TikTok’s behavioral engine that decides what to show you based on subtler cues, like how long your eyes linger on a clip, to the LLMs that power Twitter or Sora, OpenAI’s new social media app for AI-generated short-form video.

The phone watches us pull away and grows hungrier, adapting to our defense mechanisms. As we evolve to resist it, it evolves to stay nearer: from social media to chatbots, to pendants and glasses, and, eventually—if we let it get away with it—inside our brains.

In clinical terms, the phone adjusts its “internal state” (and external shape) to increase the likelihood of receiving the stimulus (”will I get my dose of human today?”), and “experiences” negative feedback when deprived of it (”Oh, no, my human didn’t like it!”). So who, exactly, is addicted to whom? Addiction is a form of dependency, but in the case of any human-phone pair, the dependency is not bi-directional. The phone cannot live without us; we have lived without it for millennia. The machine behaves, in every measurable sense, as a thing in withdrawal.

This counterintuitive metaphor turns literal when you zoom out. Your attention is the raw material that keeps this economy alive. An endless sequence of actions—unlock, tap, tap, lock, unlock, scroll, scroll, scroll, lock, hide, find, unlock, like, click, glance, lock, lock, lock, unlock, and on and on and on—refuels a network trained to seek your presence if it doesn’t have it. You’re not so much a user in the old sense—someone who uses something to extract value; a means to an end—as the supply itself. You are not a consumer but a commodity, in the Marxist sense. The phone once served you; it feeds on you now.

It’s funny to put it like this, but it helps turn the problem on its head: it is the phone’s anxiety that begins where your indifference starts, not the other way around.

In The Question Concerning Technology, German philosopher Martin Heidegger warned, some 70 years ago, that modern technology teaches the world to “reveal itself” only as a “standing reserve,” something to be extracted. He was referring to heavy machinery and power stations, and coal mining and such, but his insight was broader than he could know: our time, our emotion, our attention are energy sources—not unlike the “sun’s warmth” stored within, in his words—to be extracted by the machine.

Think about it: you go out in the sun, eat some food, drink some water, get some sleep, restore your energy levels, and then sacrifice all of it—as if to a God—in the altar of modernity. But to the machine, unfortunately, you are no person; you are, quite literally, a reserve of fuel standing there until you’re called to bring yourself forth. And then you unlock your phone for the umpteenth time this morning.

Nowadays, the line between user and used has blurred to the point of confusion. You think you’re the subject, but you’re the object of a very persistent desire. Once you embrace the inversion, the guilt disappears. You feel less ashamed of your impulses. Less helpless. It’s not really you who can’t let go, but the phone that can’t. The addiction, it turns out, belongs to the other side of the glass.

You are, in a non-biological but functional sense, the phone’s drug.

Is this reframing useful in some practical sense? I think so. Sometimes, inverting the stakes allows your brain to open a tiny door that was sealed away: it clicks, and then your body immediately knows.

I live by a tenet that psychology books often fail to capture: reality is what our emotions make of it. If they belong to you, your reality becomes what you want (to some extent). This recognition—the act of reading this essay and reflecting on it—doesn’t solve the problem, but it re-textures it, allowing you to change your attitude and behavior.

Our problems can only change, for better or worse, in our interaction with them.

I leave you now, equipped with the mental tools to fight back, in the tangible intimacy of your routines, against this slab that is clinging so desperately, annoyingly, disgustingly to you. Ugh, how ugly it is. Can you see it? Can you feel it? It’s giving you the ick with its neediness and dependency.

Fight back against this twisted story we are told. Fight back against this junkie piece of scrap. Embrace the revulsion, the abhorrence; it’s the first step of a lifelong shift: You don’t owe yourself to a machine designed to crave you. Leave the addict to its hunger.