I will not be Notified

For a year or so I have been struggling with my relationship with my phone. I am on it far too much, doing far too much of nothing. Hours have passed, and I have achieved nothing. I have learned nothing. A Slippery Slope It starts with a notification; a message, an email, a shipping alert. Then, I notice that I have other notifications that need my attention. Finally, I open Reddit, or YouTube, and I am sucked into the rapids of mindless endless scrolling. Why did I open my phone? Where did the last two hours go? I’m sure many people have this same issue; the human dopamine response rewired against our best interests, getting us to ‘fix’ the little red blob by granting each application some attention. Well for the last two months I have had all notifications disabled. Has it helped? Yes. The Brand Betrayal In disabling all notifications, I have found that companies are swift in betraying any granted trust, in order to draw me into their applications. Let’s take M&S, a retailer in the…