Set your phone to black and white

This title is literal. My phone is now in greyscale, aka black and white. And my life hasn’t changed overnight, but as someone who sits on the border of phone addiction, it’s a good start. I’m not here to parse apart the definition of addiction exactly, but upwards of 57% of us are addicted to our phones. In young people the phenomenon is even more extreme, with one study revealing that about 40% to 50% of younger folks will say, "Ultimately, I think it probably makes more sense to have a bone in my hand broken than it does to have my phone broken."

The moment I fully realized I needed to have my phone in black and white came the first time I briefly switched it back into color. That might sound backwards, but let me explain. A friend had sent me a photo, and I briefly switched back into color to fully see the image they were trying to show me. But I couldn’t focus on the photo. The colors were so vibrant, so saturated, much brighter than the colors in the world around me. I hadn’t realized it until that moment, because years of phone usage had rendered the colors on my phone normal to me, but the iPhone’s colors are more vivid than almost everything we encounter in the natural world. And in that moment, I knew I had to stick to black and white for a long time.

Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash

Years of phone usage caused the real world to lose some brightness, and it took an alarmingly long time, and the jarring moment above, for me to notice. It was so gradual, the evolution from the flip phone to the smart phone, years with my head buried in the screen, the hyper saturation of color and content in the palm of my hand, eventually the vividness of the phone eclipses the vividness of reality. I don’t want to overstate the situation, and I know some people have it worse. I’m not addicted to the phone to the point that it interferes much with my life, and I haven’t found that the screen has sucked all color out of life, by a long shot. But I have felt strongly that my dopamine, my presence, and my relationship with the brightness of life have been affected. All of that is, of course, by design.

The intense colors of your phone are just one of the ways you’re being sucked into the screen, away from reality. The countless little deliberate dopamine hits delivered by nearly every app are an attempt to grab you, steal your attention, and train you to seek rewards from your phone at a rate that you cannot acquire them out in the world. That is well known by now. But in the current iteration of smartphones and internet, the content we consume could be doing just as much as little addictive mechanisms on these apps.

Instagram and TikTok hook us with the way they’re structured, with the notifications and rewards, but the content they deliver might subtly be just as powerful. As material conditions decline, as life gets more difficult, the appeal of streamers and influencers living “perfect” lives appears to grow. As millions lose health care and schools are defunded and the rent goes up, some people get mad at the lives of the rich and famous. But others get parasocial. Countless viewers develop one-sided relationships with millionaires, and instead of resentment, or simply distance, they begin to feel that the successes of a stranger is to be celebrated, or even that the good fortune of these people on the screen is somehow their own good fortune.

That’s just one strange way the content on our phones sucks us in. A lot of videos we see are actually doing something much closer to what the vivid colors on the phone do. So much of the content we consume keeps us coming back because it delivers emotional intensity. On one platform we might see infuriating and devastating information, on another we get hilarity, on another we get adrenaline. It’s not an indictment of our lives to say that curated videos, delivered by the dozen, can prompt emotions or flood us with chemicals in ways that are more intense and vivid than the day to day routine of our lives.

Another way to put it is that content creators can live at the extreme. They can jump off cliffs with a parachute and ride horses in Mongolia and film dramatic, fake conflicts with their partners that are essentially reality TV. They can manufacture and convey an emotional saturation and intensity that is radically different than the typical mundane routine of our lives. This is what they’re paid to do. They aren’t paid to show us an 8-hour shift behind a counter, or at a desk typing emails. No, they earn money by making us feel, and as the competition in that market has grown the content on our phones has come to deliver greater and greater chemical punches, greater emotional and aesthetic saturation.

Photo by Carlynn Alarid on Unsplash

One of the great and terrible revelations of media makers, whether at CNN or on TikTok, has been that awful emotions grab and hold us and form addictions as much or more than positivity. Millions of us find ourselves hooked on disaster and anger even more than cute cats and silly memes that dominated an earlier wave of online consumption. So we’re glued to the screens that raise our cortisol and adrenaline, glued to righteous anger without realizing that the way we interact with it is fundamentally impotent. We think we’re taking action by posting, but in fact we’re often a rat in a cage pressing a button again and again to get a feeling, because even a bad feeling is better than numbness.

But when we press these buttons again and again, we do grow numb. Hyper-saturation of emotion leaves us feeling drained. We’re not meant to feel this way. A certain level of emotional intensity is meant to be the exception, not the norm. Like with all addictions, increased usage shifts the baseline. Our tolerance grows. It takes more to make us feel, and we’re drawn to greater emotional intensity, seeking that hyper-saturation that our phones provide.

The question is, what happens to reality? What happens when reality grows dim, when the world feels less vivid than the portal we hold in our hands? What happens when our friends live, maybe even live primarily, in our phones? There’s not a simple answer here, but one outcome of the world feeling less and less vivid is a divestment from reality. Intentional or not, more time spent in virtual spaces inherently means less time spent with neighbors. This is not an indictment of all online spaces, not by a long shot. Whether because of the pandemic, or disability, or distance, countless online spaces have done a lot of good. But collectively, as a society, we’re at a juncture where billionaires want us to cede the material world to them. They might talk about “the metaverse,” AI, and virtual reality constantly, but they want that for us, not for them.

The ruling class knows the importance of the material world, the land, the oceans. They know that everything else follows from control of these spaces and resources. The hyper-vividness of our phones, the addictiveness of their apps, and the way they want society to be arranged is a whole lot like The Matrix. Many in the ruling class would love for our bodies to be in pods while our minds are subservient to them. It’s on us to reject that paradigm.

It’s on us to invest deliberately in reality, in community, in fighting for a better future. And that means, in part, freeing ourselves from the confines of the phone. Turning these devices to black and white, taking the hyper-vividness out of them, and allowing reality to feel more real than the device is just one small step. But in that step is a gateway to a greater freedom, a move back into the world around us, a step towards reclaiming reality. - JP

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P.S. Here’s the step-by-step for getting your phone into black and white:

1. Open Settings

2. Open General

3. Choose Accessibility

4. Choose Display Accommodations

5. Select Color Filters

6. Toggle Color Filters On

7. Select Grayscale