Currents

Written by Haley Walk

At the start of this year, I moved out.
Not out of my apartment, or my parents’ place for the third time.
I moved out of my phone.

I deleted TikTok, Netflix, and the same glowing games I played when my boredom exceeded its bearable bounds. I stopped answering the phantom buzzing of my phone, constantly cradled in my pocket or palm in anticipation of a message or a need. I began leaving my phone in my bedroom when I returned home from school or work, and instead conversed with my housemates or simply allowed silence to persist in my spaces. When I go on walks, it stays behind, unless I want to call my long-distance boo, of course.

Contrary to what you may think, I didn’t start this cellular purge as a New Year’s resolution, nor for dramatic effect or pride (well, maybe a little bit of pride – signed, oldest daughter). I noticed a habitual urge to reach for my personal brain box. Not only in pauses, boredom, or silence, but at family gatherings, house parties, and friend reunions. I began to tire of my inability to spend time with myself and the important people in my life without reaching for my phone.

While scrolling through countless hours of social media feeds, I’d see ads for screen-time management subscriptions, apps, and devices. I had conversations with friends and saw videos of strangers talking about the looming presence of their phones, expressing the desire to disengage but an inability to follow through. After much thought, two “truths” became cemented in my mind:

(1) Having a dependent, and sometimes addictive, relationship with your phone seems to be a largely universal experience, and (2) we increasingly prioritize digital connection over meaningful, actual lived experiences shared with present, important people.

So, I started researching and found good news and bad:

The good: What I thought was a bad habit is a more complex phenomenon than any individual could possibly take accountability for. The burden is not yours alone. It’s a symptom of the system, built in.

The bad: As a result, we must hold ourselves accountable to create the change we want to see. It’s our job to rebuild and repair our relationships and communities. “They” will not create the change we long to see without our own voices requesting “they” do so, in perpetuity.

Sociologists Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman describe our era as one of networked individualism.¹ Instead of belonging primarily to tight, bounded communities within which humans have historically lived, such as communes, neighborhoods, congregations, and extended families, we now operate as individuals at the center of personalized networks. We maintain connections with others over distance rather than inhabiting shared spaces. The individual becomes the primary social unit. 

This framework helped me name something I couldn’t quite articulate before. When I stopped responding to texts immediately, nothing collapsed. No one panicked. Most relationships absorbed the delay without consequence. The urgency I felt wasn’t coming from the people I loved. It was coming from the seductive technocratic structure I found myself traversing, always at the ready for the next text or like. My phone had trained me to equate constant availability with attentive care. For many, this feels overwhelming and begins to skew our perception of our people. The feeling in our bodies manifests as such.

We no longer belong to communities; we manage networks.

Sherry Turkle writes that we “expect more from technology and less from each other”²—an uncomfortably familiar truth. My phone offers opportunities for connection without vulnerability. Companionship without obligation. Endless content without the unpredictability of real conversation with real people in physical spaces. Elsewhere, she observes that we risk “giving human qualities to objects and treating each other as things.”²

In addition to deleting apps that no longer felt worth my time, I subscribed to a year of The New Yorker in both print and digital editions. A cartoon by Tommy Siegel in their January 2026 publication illustrates Turkle’s thoughts. Showing two astronauts standing on the moon, taking a picture of Earth before saying, “Got it, let’s go,” it’s a relatively absurd depiction. But still, it’s familiar. The cartoon reflects what Turkle warns against—a shift from presence to performance, from relationship to recording.

Even in our most extraordinary moments, the instinct is to capture rather than experience.

So, how might this manifest across our day-to-day?

Fragmented attention becomes normal. Silence feels wrong, stillness is uncomfortable. Rest feels unworthy of reward. A pause in conversation acts as a cue to scroll. And God forbid we have to make or receive a phone call, whether it’s from our doctor or a close friend. We are reachable everywhere and present nowhere. Even when I leave my phone in my room, I can still feel the pull.

Your phone is designed to eliminate gaps. It rewards movement, anything to stimulate productivity: scroll, refresh, respond, add to cart.³

Here we find the root of my frustration. The expectation of self-control placed on users and consumers seems intentionally avoidant, as these systems are deliberately designed to erode that self-control. These are not neutral spaces like we’d prefer to believe. They are built to keep us inside, structured to maximize engagement, web traffic, and consumption. Features like infinite scroll, personalized recommendations, frictionless purchasing, and friction-full subscription cancellations are not accidents, but intentional design choices rooted in business models that depend on the economy of our attention.³ And still, the burden remains on individuals to “just use less,” to log off, to resist.

The implications of this go beyond personal habits. Pervasive technology is not just a design problem—it is a responsibility problem. Our attempts to regulate these spaces often reinforce the idea that it is still up to the individual to revise their tech use. Ben Green argues that conversations about “tech ethics” often focus on individual responsibility, what designers should do, or what users should choose, while ignoring the systems that structure those choices.⁴ Responsibility becomes diffused across platforms, corporations, algorithms, and users. Everyone participates, so no one feels fully accountable, if at all.

We can see this clearly in current policy responses. If my phone were a room I had to learn how to leave, most regulations are focused on teaching people, especially young users, how to behave better inside it. State-level age verification laws in the United States and proposals in places like Australia place responsibility on parents and individuals to manage their engagement. Federal efforts such as the Kids Online Safety Act emphasize parental controls and safety settings, rather than questioning the design of the room itself, its algorithms, incentives, metrics, and goals. While broader frameworks like the European Union’s Digital Services Act begin to address systemic risks, much of the regulatory landscape still assumes the room is fixed. The burden remains on individuals to step outside of something they did not build.

So, we come to a crossroads. When everything can be attributed to or blamed on “the system,” responsibility begins to feel atmospheric, present everywhere, yet felt nowhere. The room exists as it was meant, but it is sustained because we remain inside it. And while stepping out is possible, as I’ve learned, it is not a neutral act. It requires effort against intentionally designed factors that resist it.

Perhaps now, you can more easily understand the motivation behind my decision. I didn’t delete those apps because they were inherently evil. I deleted them because I wanted to know whether I was choosing my habits, or if something else was choosing them for me. I wanted to see what it felt like to fully inhabit my physical places. To embrace those mundane, magnificent spaces that exist between a kitchen with three chatty girlfriends, or by myself, dangling upside down off the side of my bed, knowing nothing but the rush of my blood and depth of my breath. With no one and no sound at all.

In those lone, silent moments, I often ponder sentiments like Mary Oliver’s, 

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”⁵

What spaces are we existing in without realizing it? What malignant circumstances are we allowing to persist? What systems and incentives within our personal tech have shaped our expectations of community, presence, and responsibility so subtly that we mistake them for personality and normalcy?

I moved out of my phone this year. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not quite perfect at this living-in-the-moment thing yet; my computer takes up most of my time anyway (#gradstudentlife), and Instagram memes will always have a special place in my heart.

But I still feel victorious in my attempts to embrace this process. Reorganizing the prioritization of my relationships with people, places, and things will be a lifelong endeavor. And if there’s one thing this life can guarantee, it’s that time will pass. I want to be conscious of how I spend its passing.

And for today, I’m reading real paper books in green outdoor spaces again, and that’s the biggest win this girl could hope for. 

Tag- #youreit

References

[1] Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked: The new social operating system. MIT Press.

[2] Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books.

[3] Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked. Penguin Press.

[4] Green, B. (2021). The contestation of tech ethics: A sociotechnical approach to technology ethics in practice. Journal of Social Computing, 2(3), 209–225. https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2021.0018

[5] Oliver, M. (2005). The summer day. In New and selected poems: Volume one. Beacon Press.