It's not just training ourselves, it's companies training us. When people talk about dopamine hits from getting a like on a post, or feeling a buzz from an app, they are explicitly setting out to create a behavioral pattern that benefits them in some way. They are training us like Pavlov's dogs, and while humans are smarter, we do respond to operant conditioning.

At the end of the day, we as people have to react to this environment that's been created, but the people who created it knew what they were doing.

There are many employers who feel they can contact you at anytime.

When I had a smartphone, I never told my employer. I told him I only had a Landline, and I had a chatty roommate.

On the days I felt they might call, I just took the phone off the hook.

> No one is forced to look at their phone, the reality is that people have trained themselves to want it.

Not quite. Tech and social media companies have spent billions to make their devices and apps as addictive as possible.

There are 6 anecdotes in this thread where friends and family apply force to get a person to look at their phone. Social force, but still. Force.

Consider the soft forces of marketing, distraction, conformity, attraction and temptation. They are as real as a twisted arm.

Sure, I agree, it's all very coercive. But I think the point really is... physical force isn't even necessary. We're already addicted

even if you ignore addiction , mobile phones have been integrated into society in so many infrastructure-like roles that they are hardly at all optional or 'ignorable' at this point.

When you live in a world that requires bills to be paid via mobile, rent to be paid via mobile, mass transit tickets bought via mobile, physical location reservation via mobile, as well as any customer service only available via mobile... who cares about personal addiction; normal life isn't feasible without a mobile phone at that point, and very few (if any at all) mobile phones are designed from the premise that they should respect your attention.

The mobile phones that are designed to preserve the users attention are widely incompatible with any functions that the user needs (billpay/specific group apps, whatever) to stay integrated with the systems being forced upon them, so those options are already non-starter.

That means this problem is worth discussing -- non-compulsive normal people as well as compulsive addicts are being affected by the lack of 'respect for attention' that mobile phones have, and this problem intersects with the 'required prevalence' of mobile phones across the world.

The coercive forces are beneath discussion because we're all addicted anyway?

I dunno man. That sounds weird.

And there are quite a few anecdotes on how to prevent people from forcing you, some of them written by me :)

My overall point, however, is that there will never be an external negative reinforcement to look on your phone. We all have it internalized already and that's far more compelling than any external pressure ever could be.