I caught myself at the café last week, which is the only reason I'm writing this and not pretending I'm above it.
The coffee came. Before I'd touched the cup, before I'd properly registered it was there, my hand had gone to the phone and turned it over and I was looking at the screen. There was nothing on it. No message, no reason. I hadn't decided to do it. The hand decided, the way it knows how to find a light switch in the dark.
I want to be careful here, because there's a genre of writing about this I can't stand. The detox manifesto. The triumphant week off screens. The quiet implication that the writer has solved it and you, weak reader, could too, if only you bought their planner. I haven't solved anything. I'm typing this on the same phone.
But I did, that once, turn it face-down. The coffee was good and there was a plane tree in the window and a man outside was failing to parallel park with real commitment, and I thought: this is plenty, I don't need the other thing.
I lasted about four minutes.
Then the hand did its trick again and I was back, scrolling something I won't dignify by naming, having traded the plane tree and the parking man for it without noticing the trade until it was already done.
So that's where I am with it. Not winning. Occasionally awake. The small ambition is to catch the hand a little more often than I did last week, and to mean it when I turn the thing over, even if I only manage to mean it for four minutes at a stretch.