Why Are We Afraid of Our Thoughts?

A few days ago, my phone died.

It wasn’t a dramatic, throw-it-away-and-start-shopping kind of dead. It was just exhausted like me. The battery, which now operates at roughly sixty percent of its original capacity, had finally surrendered to the use and abuse of a particularly long day. I was riding a train home around 10:00 PM when it happened, returning from a city about thirty-five miles north and a little bit east of where I live. Construction somewhere along the tracks had slowed the train to a crawl, and outside the windows the darkness was split by the lights of passing streets and neighborhoods.

When my phone finally took its last breath for the day and went black, I slipped it into my pocket and looked up.

There were seven people, including me, in the train car.

Four teenagers sat together, though “together” probably isn’t the right word. Each of them seemed to occupy a separate digital universe, their heads bowed toward their own glowing screens. A rough-looking man had propped his bicycle in the onboard rack and sat with his back against the wall, feet stretched across the seat next to him, scrolling. Another passenger leaned against the vertical handrail near the door waiting for his stop, his eyes fixed on whatever the algorithm had decided was important for him to see next.

Seven people and seven phones.

For a brief moment, I noticed something I’m hardly aware of anymore. We were all occupying the same physical space but we were almost entirely absent from it. No one was talking. No one was looking around. No one seemed particularly interested in where they were or who was around them.

I knew my phone was dead, but I still felt the urge to pull it back out of my pocket. I knew it wouldn’t work. The battery had given its last for the day. Nothing but my own reflection would appear, but I wanted to hold it anyway.

I wanted something to keep me from sitting alone with my own thoughts. I’ve had seasons of life when I’ve been uncomfortable, maybe even a bit afraid, of my own thoughts. I entered one of those periods again not too long ago.

Recently, I came across an observation by Mona Lazar that gave voice to what was in my mind that evening. She wrote, “The phone is both the symptom and the mechanism. It keeps you optimizing, comparing, producing, performing, even in the moments that used to belong to just being alive.”

I’ve come back to that thought a few times because it explains succinctly something that I hadn’t noticed before. We’ve systematically eliminated nearly every moment in life that used to belong to boredom.

Standing in line at the grocery store used to involve standing in line. Waiting for your spouse to finish brushing their teeth before coming to bed used to involve waiting. Riding an elevator used to involve the peculiar social discomfort of pretending not to notice the other people trapped in the metal box with you. Today, all of those moments have become opportunities to consume something.

We scroll, check, refresh, and optimize.

We tell ourselves we’re using those tiny fragments of otherwise “wasted time” productively. The truth is, that’s not what’s happening at all.

Our phones are certainly entertaining, but I don’t think entertainment alone explains their hold on us. Plenty of entertaining things have existed throughout history. What makes this period in history unique, however, is that our phones are always available. Lazar alluded to this when she compared our phones to a pocket-sized escape hatch, instantly accessible whenever a thought, uncomfortable or otherwise, starts to surface.

The company I started building just one year ago has been spiraling toward insolvency because expenses outpaced revenue and new investments didn’t land on the schedule I hoped. That train ride made me realize that I wasn’t actually addicted to my phone. I was addicted to the temporary relief it provides from uncertainty, grief, loneliness, responsibility, and the uncomfortable work of becoming something more.

The season of life I’m in right now has no shortage of things to think about. Earlier that day I had driven my deceased aunt’s car to another city to sell it. I am serving as executor of her estate, which means there has been a steady stream of paperwork, decisions, responsibilities, and memories to sort through. At the same time, I am trying to nurture a business that is struggling, adapt to a new consulting engagement that demands significant attention, and prepare for the reality that one of my children and his wife are about to move halfway around the world.

Each of those experiences is pretty normal. Excluding the loss of my aunt, the experiences of late have been blessings, but blessings that have some weight to them. Responsibilities also have weight. So does change. And life.

That might be why I wanted my phone so badly that evening. I just wanted relief.

Going back to the idea of the “pressure valve,” Lazar makes the point that the “world asks too much of us.” Our phones aren’t evil. In many ways they are extraordinarily useful. They connect us, educate us, entertain us, and occasionally help us find a restaurant that is still open at 2:30 AM.

Here’s the issue: relief isn’t recovery.

Recovery typically requires sitting with something long enough for it to become something else. When a bone breaks, you can find relief in pain medication, but recovery requires time and focused rehabilitation.

Many of my best ideas arrive while I’m driving, showering, mowing the lawn, or staring out a train window into the black of night. They almost never arrive while mindlessly consuming information. They arrive after my brain has exhausted its need for distraction and finally settles into the harder work of thinking.

I sometimes wonder if we’re losing that capacity.

Deep, critical thinking requires time. It also requires sticking with an idea past known observations into a sometimes exciting and sometimes uncomfortable territory beyond that. It requires patience, but the environment we’ve built around ourselves rewards exactly the opposite behavior. We skim, react, and move on. Before one thought has finished forming, another notification or YouTube Short arrives asking for our attention.

I see this tendency in my own life in two places that seem unrelated but probably aren’t: prayer and ChatGPT.

There’s irony in that sentence given the fact that I was literally using one to discuss the other while thinking about this article. If anything, that strengthens my argument.

When I’m wrestling with a difficult question, there’s a growing temptation to get an answer as fast as possible. Why spend an hour thinking through a problem when a reasonably intelligent response can be generated in seconds? Likewise, when I pray, there are moments when I become impatient with the process itself. Rather than sitting quietly with a question, a concern, or the kinds of uncertainty I’m facing right now, part of me wants resolution immediately.

In both cases, my mind tends to scream the same thing: surely there’s a faster answer somewhere.

To be fair, sometimes there is, and the quick answer is a perfectly legitimate solution.

Some questions can’t be answered quickly because answering them isn’t actually the point. Some questions exist to change us while we wrestle with them.

By the time the train finally reached my station, my life hadn’t been forever altered. I walked into my house, plugged my phone into the charger, and waited for it to recover enough juice to play a few rounds of Wordscapes before bed. In that sense, the evening was completely unremarkable.

For a few minutes, though, I experienced something that’s become surprisingly rare in our modern life: the absence of an escape hatch. There was nowhere for my attention to go except inward as I stared into the night.

Looking out at the lights as the train crept down the tracks, I was left with a question: if a dead phone can make me uncomfortable within minutes, what exactly am I trying so hard not to think about?

I don’t think the real problem is in the distraction itself. I think the problem is that they protect us from conversations we’d rather not have with ourselves. If that’s true, then the most important question really isn’t how much time we spend looking at screens.

It’s why we’re so afraid of what might happen when we put them down.