The Barefoot Barn

On the farm we’re building a barn.

Okay, honestly, it’s an old-school man cave, with a pool table, a dart board and a very big library.

“It’s very analogue, Dad”, says my eight-year-old.

He’s right of course. There’s not a screen in sight. Yet at least my kids are used to it — over the years I’ve gone out of my way to do things with my kids that encourage them away from screens.

In fact, I joke that my aim is for them to be bored a decent amount of time. After all, that’s when ideas are formed, and connections are made. Instead, we now live in a world where we are constantly distracted, and manipulated, into what to think and believe.

And so I was interested in a study last month by Reviews.org which found that “Aussies spend 17 years of their life staring at their phone”, which works out to be 5.5 hours a day for the average Aussie.

My first thought was “that sounds pretty high”.

So I grabbed my wife’s iPhone and checked her usage (‘settings > screen time’):

“5 hours a day.”

And my screen time?

“Zero”, because I don’t carry a phone (though my wife argues strenuously that I add to her daily limit).

Worse, the study found that the average Millennial spends a massive 7.3 hours a day staring at their phone.

That’s kind of crazy when you drill down on it. Deduct sleep (eight hours) and school (where phones are banned or frowned upon) and the average young Aussie spends almost every other waking minute staring at a screen.

Astounding.

Now, I’m certainly no shrink, but my thinking is that if you’re devoting seven hours of every single day to doing something, you’re well on the road to having an addiction … which is exactly how the tech titans have engineered it.

Here’s the point: the most valuable currency in the world isn’t Bitcoin, or dollars, or Dogecoin.

The true currency of the internet age is attention.

When you capture and control people’s attention, you have power.

(Just ask Dogecoin investors, or Donald Trump.)

That’s why Big Tech will continue to use their psychological tricks (nudges, notifications, outrage) to steal more of your attention. And it’s also why they’re trying to hook us younger: kids as young as six have Messenger Kids, and Instagram has announced it’s launching a kids’ version, with a spokesman for Facebook’s Australian operations saying the platform would “fill a distinct gap in apps for children”.

What’s the bottom line?

Well, I know I’m fighting a losing battle. This is the world our kids are growing up in.

Yet I’m taking a leaf out of Steve Jobs’ book. When the founding father of technology was asked by a New York Times journalist asked what his kids thought of the iPad, he gave an unexpected reply:

“They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home”.

And that’s why I’m holding out in my old-fashioned analogue barn for as long as possible. After all, my kids have got plenty of time before they become adults ... and stare at their phones for 17 years.

Tread Your Own Path!