Phone

My recent experience surrounding tech, tech people, and for a subset of the things I'll mention here also anyone under the age of 40, is the experience of meeting people who have taken the step of accepting that they are addicts and are trying, with varying success, to take further steps to recovery. Hardly a day goes by without hearing a joke about throwing a computer into the river, or setting a phone on fire, or becoming a goose farmer (riffing on that particular guy's famous career development). A popular topic of conversation in the group chat on Sundays is Screen Time ™, after our iphones' weekly push notification reminds us of our addiction and fills us with guilt and shame; the rest of the week is riddled with the occasional phone related interjection: "I feel like shit today, too much phone" or "I need to get off this thing, bye" or "I'm on the train with 25 people and they are all on their phone" (typed while on the train, on the phone), etc. I think it's interesting that we…