the Glowing Rectangle

(A Thought Experiment on Our Phone Addiction)

Imagine this:

It's the year 2001 and you've been handed a crystal ball. Through it, you see the future. At first, nothing looks too different. Then you notice something odd. You rub your eyes and look again, still odd. You squint your eyes, hoping this might help, but same thing.

Scene after scene, people clutch thin glowing rectangles, eyes glued to them as they move around trancelike. In New York City pedestrians shuffle through bustling crowds, street performers, and honking taxis, all without looking up. A family of five sits together in perfect silence. For a moment you think, World peace at last. Then when you squint you see it again - each person guarding their own glowing rectangle. Cut to a restaurant. An airport. A grocery store. A high school football game. A college classroom. Everywhere, the rectangles. A shiver runs down your spine. The future isn't flying cars or jetpacks from The Jetsons, it's a zombie apocalypse crossed with Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, whipering, "My precious."

Houston, we have a problem.

Change rarely registers as change when it creeps in over the years. It’s only if you’ve been frozen since 2001 and then thawed out, that the change would completely overwhelm you. But living through it? It feels… normal.  

Our brains have been nibbled away so slowly, that it’s hard to notice anything is missing.

Except now, focus feels like a myth. We crave more and more stimuli to fend off boredom. We’re mentally fatigued after just figuring out what day it is so we know if we have to take the bins out. Our eyesight rivals grandma’s. And face-to-face interaction feels like a lost art. 

So how did rectangles become so irresistible?

To understand that we have to name the monster under the bed.  

Enter: Big Tech.

Big Tech took a crash course in neuroscience and learned about dopamine. Dopamine isn’t the chemical of pleasure, it’s the chemical of anticipation. It’s what makes you chase, not what makes you satisfied.  This was their jackpot, finding a chemical that hijacks your brain into finding the next high.  Casinos, the founding fathers of crumb-based conditioning, learned this first and used it as their blueprint.  People don’t need a big pay out, just a breadcrumb of randomized winnings.  The dopamine drip became their magic sauce - giving people just enough to feed the hunger for more.  Social media copied the playbook - the winner gets a compilation of the funniest cat videos or that one perfect meme after an hour of swiping.  

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If dopamine had a dating profile, it would come with some major red flags: impatience, obsessiveness, restlessness, and never satisfied. Take the story of Lay’s Potato Chips, they dated dopamine. Dopamine cheated. Their argument? “You can’t have just one.” Red. Flags.

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Fun fact: Casinos ban clocks and windows to warp your sense of time.  But get this, the rectangle is so confident in its ability to make you lose track of time that it comes preinstalled with its own clock and boasts zero blackout curtains. Add in the constant blue light glow, which tricks your brain into thinking it’s daytime and suppresses melatonin, and you’ve got a perfect storm for sleeplessness and overstimulation.

Sound familiar?  You open Instagram for a quick check and resurface 40 minutes later, brain fogged with zero recall of what you even saw.  Big Tech mastered the art of dissociation, while you’re lost in blue light paradise, they’re unleashing zombies on your brain, putting you in a semi-conscious stupor.  

So next time you want to unwind on your rectangle, know that’s dopamine knocking at your door, and it’s not bringing peppermint tea and a yoga retreat, it’s serving you an all-you-can-eat buffet of mind numbing apathy. 

No one forced this experiment on us. No one taped our eyelids open. However, no one consented to having their brains rewired.  Our reward circuits have now been trained to expect quick hits of novelty instead of the slower, deeper satisfaction that used to come from conversation, creativity, or play. Notice how difficult it is to focus on a video longer than 30 seconds at normal speed and how Instagram reels are turning into mini Hollywood productions just to keep us interested? The side effects of this science experiment looks an awful lot like ADHD.

But before you spiral down the rabbit hole of rectangles feasting on gray matter, look up neuroplasticity instead. Neuroplasticity is how our brains adapt to repeated habits. The same process that once helped us learn how to read or play instruments is now teaching us how to scroll faster, tap sooner, and crave more.  The good news: what the brain learns, it can unlearn.  You can return to your original factory settings without a hard reset and without searching “digital detox” on TikTok (please don’t).

Below are some tips to reclaim what has been robbed from you.  Notice any resistance in your body when you read the list.  Listen for any rationalizing, compromising, or full on rebellion in your head.  Remember that’s dopamine at work.  Reassure it we’re not cutting off its legs, we’re just taking it from its high speed chase down to a Sunday scenic drive.  Trading in the need for speed for the appreciation of life. 

Reboot strategies:

• Notice when you’re on your rectangle.  Catch yourself opening apps on autopilot. Make it a game.  Can you beat yesterday’s score?

• Use your rectangle with intention. Have a mission: look up that recipe, message that friend. Then exit.

• Leave your rectangle behind when you move around the house. I promise the world won’t end.

• No multitasking. One screen at a time. Watch TV or scroll - not both.

• Resist fast-forward culture.  Don’t speed up videos or skip ahead. Relearn the rhythm of real time.

• Practice what you preach. If you limit your kid’s screen time, hold yourself to the same rules.

• Delay your morning scroll. Wake up, feel the dopamine pull, and curse Big Tech for making you its junkie.

• Try a 7-day social media diet. Notice how you feel afterward - calmer, clearer, maybe even… alive.

• Exercise your brain. Grab a physical brain activity book and do one exercise a day.

• Look up. Wake up from your semi-conscious stupor by reconnecting with the living.

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If you don’t like what you see in the crystal ball, do like Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see.”