let go & GROW

The Way Home: Self-Mastery as Liberation

There was a time when the telephone rang because someone was actually calling us.

The doorbell rang because someone was standing outside.

An alarm sounded because something required our attention.

The sound meant something.

Today, our devices can call us dozens of different ways.

A text.

An email.

A like.

A comment.

Breaking news.

A sale.

A delivery.

A reminder.

A calendar alert.

Someone went live.

Someone posted.

Someone responded to something we forgot we said three days ago.

A little red number appears beside an application, and somehow it feels unfinished until we make it disappear.

We have become accustomed to carrying something with us that gives other people, businesses, applications, news organizations, employers, advertisers and algorithms the ability to say:

Look here.

And increasingly, we do.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether notifications are useful.

Of course they are.

The more interesting question is:

Who gets immediate access to my attention?

And perhaps an even more personal one:

Did I consciously decide that?

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When Did Reachable Become Available?

Technology has done extraordinary things for us.

The same device capable of interrupting dinner can tell us that our child arrived safely.

A notification can remind us about an appointment, warn us about dangerous weather, tell us medication is due, let us know someone we love needs us or help us manage a complicated life.

This isn’t an argument against technology.

It’s an examination of our relationship with it.

Because somewhere along the way, being reachable began to resemble being available.

And those aren’t the same thing.

We don’t usually think of a notification as someone requesting access to us. It’s only a sound, vibration, banner or number.

But our attention still has to orient toward it.

Research has demonstrated that phone notifications can interfere with an ongoing attention-demanding task even when people don’t actually pick up the phone and respond. More recent research published in 2026 found a temporary slowdown in cognitive processing following social-media notifications, with the size of the disruption associated with notification relevance and people’s habitual interaction with their phones. 

In other words:

Ignoring an interruption doesn’t necessarily mean we weren’t interrupted.

That interests me.

Because there may be a difference between physically leaving what I’m doing and having my attention momentarily leave it.

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What Were We Building?

There is a moment in the history of social technology that I keep returning to.

Not because it proves some secret coordinated plan for humanity.

It doesn’t.

But because of what people who helped build this technological era have openly said about attention.

In 2017, Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, spoke publicly about the thinking behind the platform’s early development. He described the goal as consuming as much of a user’s time and conscious attention as possible. He described likes and comments as part of a “social-validation feedback loop” and said the system exploited “a vulnerability in human psychology.” 

That same year, Netflix cofounder and then-CEO Reed Hastings was discussing competition during the company’s first-quarter earnings call.

He wasn’t particularly worried about another streaming company taking Netflix’s piece of some tiny entertainment pie. His point was that the available pool of human time was enormous.

Then he said something remarkable:

“We’re competing with sleep, on the margin.”

His point was that when people become absorbed in a show, they stay awake watching it. 

I don’t need those two men to have been sitting in the same room.

I don’t need a conspiracy connecting their statements.

The statements themselves are interesting enough.

Because both point toward something we rarely treat as a possession:

Our attention has value.

Our time has value.

Our engagement has value.

Even our sleep occupies hours that cannot simultaneously be spent consuming something else.

So I have to ask:

If our sleep can become competition, what else in our humanity can enter the marketplace for our attention?

Our silence?

Our boredom?

Our conversations?

Our solitude?

Our concentration?

Our relationships?

The five minutes we used to spend staring out the window doing absolutely nothing?

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The Notification Is the Call Back

This is where notifications become much more interesting to me.

If attention has economic value, then a notification isn’t merely information.

It can also be a pathway back to engagement.

That doesn’t mean every notification was maliciously engineered to manipulate us.

But think about the sequence:

Signal.

Orient.

Check.

Decide.

Respond.

Return.

Then:

Signal.

Orient.

Check.

Decide.

Respond.

Return.

And eventually something even more fascinating can happen.

There doesn’t have to be a signal.

We check anyway.

How many of us have picked up our phones without knowing exactly why?

Opened an application automatically?

Refreshed something we checked five minutes earlier?

Reached for the phone during the first quiet moment in a conversation, commercial, elevator ride, bathroom visit or waiting room?

At some point, the question becomes bigger than:

What are notifications doing?

It becomes:

What have I learned to do in anticipation of them?

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When One Interruption Becomes Many

This is where I originally started thinking about energy.

Not “energy” as some measurable battery where every person wakes up with exactly 100 units and loses two every time the phone buzzes.

We don’t have science that supports a neat equation like that.

I’m talking about something much more ordinary.

Capacity.

Attention.

Mental effort.

Emotional bandwidth.

The ability to finish one thought before beginning another.

Research on attention and task switching gives us reason to take repeated interruption seriously. A randomized field experiment involving smartphone notifications found something particularly interesting: participants whose notifications were batched and delivered three times daily reported feeling more attentive, productive, in a better mood and more in control of their phones than people receiving notifications normally. Completely eliminating notifications, however, wasn’t automatically better; that group experienced more anxiety and fear of missing out. 

I love that finding because it disrupts the easy answer.

The answer wasn’t simply:

Notifications bad. Turn everything off.

The relationship was more complicated.

Which is exactly the point.

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Have We Solved One Problem by Creating Another?

This reminded me of something far outside smartphone research.

Historian and anthropologist Joseph Tainter studied how societies respond to problems by developing greater complexity—more structures, more organization, more specialization—and how increasing complexity can eventually produce diminishing returns.

I’m not suggesting Tainter was talking about smartphones or nervous systems.

He wasn’t.

But his idea gives me an interesting metaphor for modern life.

We didn’t want to miss the email.

So we created an alert.

We didn’t want to miss the message.

Another alert.

The appointment.

Alert.

Package.

Alert.

Bank transaction.

Alert.

News.

Alert.

Someone liked something.

Alert.

Someone posted something.

Alert.

Someone we don’t know responded to someone else we barely remember.

Alert.

And I find myself wondering:

Did we solve the problem of missing information by creating the problem of never escaping it?

Technology eliminated so much friction from our lives.

But some friction may have been space.

Waiting.

Not knowing.

Remembering on our own.

Being unavailable.

Being bored.

Being somewhere without simultaneously being everywhere else.

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And Then We Look at Our Children

This conversation becomes harder to dismiss when we consider what is now happening around children and teenagers.

Social-media companies have faced extensive litigation alleging that certain platform designs contribute to compulsive use and harms among young people. Those allegations should not be confused with scientific proof of every claim made in a lawsuit.

But the scrutiny itself has become substantial.

In August 2026, Meta reached a multibillion-dollar settlement with U.S. states over allegations concerning harms to young users while continuing to deny wrongdoing. The agreed safeguards include limits on young people’s use, overnight restrictions and restrictions on notifications during school hours. 

The FTC has also explicitly examined design features intended to keep children and teens online longer and returning more frequently, including their potential effects on youth well-being. 

And just this month, California enacted additional restrictions aimed at behaviorally addictive features for users under 16, including infinite scroll and algorithmic autoplay. 

None of this proves that every adult using social media is being harmed.

But it raises a question I don’t think we should be afraid to ask:

If we are concerned enough to examine how these technologies interact with developing minds, why would we assume adult attention is somehow beyond influence?

Not identical.

Not equally vulnerable.

Not helpless.

But unaffected?

That’s a different claim.

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Are We Practicing the Behavior of Machines?

This is where my mind went somewhere darker.

I started wondering whether all this conditioning is preparing us for something.

Then I realized I don’t need to know that.

Maybe nobody gathered in a room and decided human beings should behave more like machines.

That’s an enormous claim, and I don’t have evidence for it.

The more interesting question is what we’re practicing.

A machine receives a signal and produces a response.

And increasingly, portions of human life can look strangely similar.

Ding. Look.

Buzz. Check.

Banner. Swipe.

Red number. Open.

Message. Respond.

Signal.

Response.

Signal.

Response.

Signal.

Response.

So rather than asking:

Are they turning us into robots?

I’m more interested in asking:

How much robotic behavior are we voluntarily rehearsing every day?

And what happens when technologies designed to respond to human behavior become so effective that human behavior begins responding automatically to the technology?

That’s not a prediction of some dystopian future.

It’s a question about what we’re doing right now.

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🌿 Restoring What Constant Interruption Takes

If repeated interruption can fragment our attention, the answer doesn’t necessarily have to be abandoning technology.

Perhaps restoration begins by creating places where our attention is allowed to remain whole.

Silence.

Uninterrupted focus.

Sleep.

Movement.

Nature.

Conversation.

Intentional device use.

And sometimes:

Simply doing nothing.

These things can sound almost too ordinary to matter.

Maybe that’s part of what we’ve forgotten.

Not every empty moment needs filling.

Not every pause requires entertainment.

Not every message requires an immediate response.

And not every notification deserves immediate access to us simply because it arrived.

Rest isn’t only sleep.

There is rest in finishing a thought without interruption.

There is rest in walking without carrying an ongoing conversation in your pocket.

There is rest in sitting across from another human being without periodically disappearing into a screen.

There is rest in reading long enough to disappear into the page.

In gardening.

Prayer.

Writing.

Cooking.

Exercise.

Nature.

Music.

And yes, there is rest in occasionally staring out the damn window and accomplishing absolutely nothing.

There may even be something restorative about allowing boredom to remain boredom long enough to discover what comes after it.

The goal isn’t deprivation.

It isn’t a digital purity contest.

And it isn’t throwing our phones into the woods. The trees didn’t ask for that either. 😂🌿

It is awareness.

Because there’s something profoundly different about choosing when I engage and continually being summoned to engage.

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🌿 Before You Decide There Is Anything to Change

I’m not asking you to decide that your phone, notifications or social media are bad for you.

I’m asking you to discover what your relationship with them actually is.

You might discover that your devices serve you exactly as you intended.

You may discover that certain features are incredibly useful while others interrupt you more than you realized.

You might find habit.

Comfort.

Dependence.

Connection.

Convenience.

Distraction.

Joy.

Anxiety.

Or simply a relationship you’ve never stopped long enough to examine.

The purpose isn’t to find a problem.

The purpose is to determine whether there is a relationship worth looking at.

Before changing anything, try something simpler.

Notice.

For one day, don’t turn everything off.

Don’t impose a screen-time rule.

Don’t try to become “better” at using your phone.

Just notice.

Notice every time something outside of you summons your attention.

Then notice what happens inside of you when it does.

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🌿 Reflective Prompts

• What is my relationship with my phone and social media when I really pay attention to it?
• How important are notifications to the way I use my phone? Have I ever considered why?
• Which notifications genuinely serve me?
• Which could disappear without meaningfully affecting my life?
• Would navigating my phone without notifications feel inconvenient, uncomfortable, peaceful—or something else?
• When my phone sounds, vibrates or lights up, how quickly do I feel the need to look?
• What happens inside me when I see a notification and deliberately don’t respond?
• Do I ever check my phone when there hasn’t been a notification?
• What emotions make me reach for my device—boredom, loneliness, anxiety, curiosity, excitement?
• How comfortable am I being unreachable?
• What does my phone give me that I genuinely value?
• What, if anything, does it regularly take from me—attention, time, sleep, concentration, presence or stillness?
• Based on my answers, does my relationship with my devices deserve a closer look?

There are no right answers.

There is only something worth noticing.

Because your phone may be working exactly as designed.

Is your relationship with it working as you intended?

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We have spent the last several reflections examining what technology places before us, what we consume, what our patterns reveal and now what continually calls us back.

Turning off a notification can change the environment.

But learning how to return to ourselves after years of responding to everything around us?

That’s something else entirely.

Because the notification happens outside the body.

The response happens inside it.

🌿 Next: Reflection Twelve — Regulating Your Nervous System

🌿 Honor the experience. Share the transformation. 🤍🌿🤍

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References

Fournier, H., Fournel, A., Osiurak, F., Koenig, O., Pâris, F., Gaujoux, V., & Ringeval, F. (2026). Attention hijacked: How social media notifications disrupt cognitive processing. Computers in Human Behavior, 179, 108926. The study found transient cognitive slowing following social-media notifications and examined the roles of salience, conditioning, relevance and habitual smartphone interaction. 

Read the study on ScienceDirect⁠

Fitz, N., Kushlev, K., Jagannathan, R., Lewis, T., Paliwal, D., & Ariely, D. (2019). Batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being. Computers in Human Behavior, 101, 84–94. Randomized field experiment examining normal, batched and absent smartphone notifications. 

Read the study on ScienceDirect⁠

Wilmer, H. H., Sherman, L. E., & Chein, J. M. (2017). Smartphones and cognition: A review of research exploring the links between mobile technology habits and cognitive functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 605. Reviews evidence including findings that notification sounds or vibrations can disrupt performance even without interacting with the phone. 

Read the review at PubMed Central⁠

Pandey, E. (2017, November 9). Sean Parker: Facebook was designed to exploit human “vulnerability.” Axios. Parker discussed capturing users’ time and conscious attention and described a “social-validation feedback loop.” 

Read the Axios report⁠

Netflix, Inc. (2017, April 17). Q1 2017 Netflix Inc. earnings call. Reed Hastings discussed the broad competition for people’s time and said Netflix was “competing with sleep, on the margin.” 

Read the 2017 earnings-call transcript⁠

Federal Trade Commission. (2024). The attention economy: Monopolizing kids’ time online. Announcement of an FTC workshop examining design features that keep children and teens online longer and returning more frequently and their potential effects on well-being. 

Federal Trade Commission⁠

Federal Trade Commission. (2024). FTC staff report finds large social media and video streaming companies have engaged in vast surveillance of users with lax privacy controls and inadequate safeguards for kids and teens. 

FTC staff report overview⁠

Reuters. (2026, August 26). Meta reaches $16.68 billion settlement over social media harms to children. Meta denied wrongdoing while agreeing to settle claims brought by U.S. states and implement additional youth safeguards. 

Read the Reuters report⁠