You’re Not Using the Phone. It’s Using You.
But you can still choose to look up
By Nick Holt
The sky had that weightless Brisbane blue—bleached and high, stretched thin over a winter afternoon. In the shade, the air bit at the edges. But in the sun, it could almost pass for spring. Light moved slowly across the grass. Trees stood still, as if holding their breath. Even the birdsong came unhurried, spaced out between the jacarandas like memory returning.
I sat on a bench, watching the day unfold. A boy kicked a football against his father’s legs. An old man sipped from a thermos in the crook of a paperback. A young couple leaned into each other, faces soft with whatever held them there. For a moment, it felt like the world was still intact.
Then I looked closer.
The boy’s father was watching a screen. The old man’s book was in his lap, forgotten, while his phone lit up between his knees. The couple wasn’t speaking—they were each staring into separate feeds. Every bench, every patch of sun, every figure in the park was bowed toward glass.
No one saw the sky. No one felt the air. No one heard the silence between the birds.
And what unsettled me wasn’t the loneliness of it—it was the choreography. How natural it all looked. As if this had always been the arrangement. As if the park, and the light, and the season itself were just background data for a more important feed.
It didn’t feel like the future.
It felt like the closing credits.
The device demands nothing. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t knock. It simply waits—knowing that we’ll come. It has made itself the easiest choice in every moment, the closest distraction, the softest way to disappear. And because we are tired, restless, overstimulated, and undernourished, we obey.
We tell ourselves it’s just a tool, as if tools don’t shape the hand that wields them. But the phone doesn’t extend the mind—it rewires it. The world it offers is frictionless: no slowness, no silence, no strain. Which means the habits it forms are ones allergic to depth. Our attention—once a faculty of discipline—is now a liability. The longer the thought, the more fragile it feels.
We forget things we used to remember. We scroll instead of reading. We react instead of reflecting. Even boredom—a state once essential to imagination—has become intolerable. The moment we are left alone with our thoughts, we reach for relief. The device answers instantly—and always with less than we hoped for.
In conversation, it sits on the table like a third guest. It listens without listening. It breaks the gaze. Parents half-watch their children while flicking through strangers. Lovers lie beside each other and drift apart, one swipe at a time. Whole friendships are reduced to the maintenance of illusion—check-ins, emojis, the appearance of being in touch. But the presence is gone.
And in the background, someone is always watching. Every step tracked. Every hesitation logged. Not by a man in a van, but by systems too large to see and too quiet to hear. Surveillance has become ambient. Consent has become implied. Our preferences, locations, moods, desires—all translated into data, packaged, sold, fed back into the loop. Privacy hasn’t died. It’s been prostituted.
Solitude used to be sacred. It was where the soul stretched its legs. Where ideas had time to gather weight. Now solitude is just absence—a gap to be filled. Silence is mistaken for emptiness. The self becomes intolerable unless mediated, filtered, broadcast.
And with the collapse of solitude comes the collapse of thought. Information pours in, but understanding rarely follows. The hierarchy has inverted: noise floats, signal sinks. Everyone is informed, but no one is steady.
Every headline, every take, every viral fragment competes for our nervous system. Truth becomes tribal. Knowledge becomes custom. Wisdom is nowhere to be found.
None of this is accidental. The machine was built to addict. Not metaphorically—literally. Infinite scroll, variable rewards, the twitch of validation—these are the mechanics of compulsion. And what we call choice is just the illusion that we’re the ones in charge.
The toll is visible, if you know where to look. Depression, anxiety, insomnia, self-harm—all rising, especially among the young. And beneath those statistics is something quieter: the feeling that nothing is solid. That we are weightless. Perpetually connected and completely unanchored.
Even culture is eroding. What once emerged from place, from ritual, from memory, is now flattened by virality. The algorithm selects for sameness, not distinction. A thousand cities scrolling through the same dances, the same jokes, the same angry monologues. Even rebellion has been domesticated—filtered, branded, sold back to us as lifestyle.
Politics has not escaped. It has been devoured. The public square has become a digital colosseum where rage is rewarded, subtlety punished, and nuance left unread. Debate is replaced with performance. Positions harden into identities. There is no persuasion, only spectacle.
And the worst part? We did this to ourselves. The machine didn’t conquer us. It seduced us. We gave it our time, our thoughts, our attention—bit by bit, tap by tap—until we mistook the feed for the world, and the self for the account that bears our name.
This is not just a shift in behavior. It’s a shift in being. We are not living with technology. We are living as technology—input, output, feedback, loop.
You can still feel it, if you sit quietly long enough. The weight of your own mind returning. The faint memory of what it means to be unobserved. To think without broadcasting. To see the sky without documenting it.
But it takes time. And silence. And a kind of courage that feels unnatural now.
Because once you’ve tasted the frictionless world, the real one feels slow. Demanding. Inconvenient.
Which is another way of saying: alive.
But the black mirror is not the enemy. It’s a reflection. Of us. Of our appetites, our distractions, our longing to be seen. The glass only shows what we give it.
And that means it can be reclaimed.
A phone can still be a tool—if we choose to use it as one. Not a substitute for experience, but a way to share it after we’ve lived it. Not a surrogate for thought, but a means to extend it once it has matured. Not a stage, not a slot machine, not a god—but a blade we keep sheathed until the work requires it.
Imagine a world where we look before we record. Where we sit through boredom until it turns into something else. Where our minds grow dense again, like forests left untended. Where conversation returns—slow, halting, human. Where solitude is not a void, but a place we go to remember who we are without an audience.
That world isn’t gone. It’s simply being drowned out.
Turn the volume down. Look up. Feel the day on your skin. Let the phone rest where it is—on the bench, in the bag, forgotten. Walk without music. Wait without distraction. Listen. Not for a ping, but for the part of you that knows how to be whole.
Because the black mirror will never stop asking for your attention.
But you don’t have to give it.