Is my smartphone killing my brain?

I slide under the covers earlier than usual, anxious to return to a nonfiction book that has lately gripped my attention. I do most of my reading in bed: Lying prone, my mind and body relaxed, I use books to visit distant lives and places far away from my suburban two-bedroom condo just outside San Francisco.

This latest place happens to be the inner-city projects of Philadelphia, the setting of Joseph Earl Thomas’s memoir “Sink,” where the first-time author describes his brutal coming-of-age lessons about blackness and masculinity while growing up an abusive drug-addled extended family.

Before I reach for “Sink,” I do some sinking of my own. On impulse, I pick up my smartphone and run lazily through an inane checklist of things my weary mind wants updated: How are the Dodgers doing? And the Warriors? Any new comments on my Facebook post uploaded earlier that day? Have any emails or texts landed since the last time I checked, less than a half-hour before?

Helplessly, I cuddle up in the arms of the devil himself, ignoring the better angels of my nature, mindlessly scrolling through a succession of insipid, time-sucking 30-second TikTok video clips on my Facebook app. After another demanding day before the computer, my brain is tired. Demanding easy entertainment, I harbor a shameless appetite for just the kind of puerile stimulation social media is designed to feed. 

So, what am I watching, exactly? The Hell if I know.

My intellect is lulled into sleepy submission, reduced to an endless cycle of swipe, tap, laugh, groan, swipe and tap. Each clip I watch provides my brain with a tiny burst of dopamine that compels me to keep swiping, keep tapping, with the promise of yet another guilty pleasure.

Touch-screen technology has trained my mind to become as reactive as Pavlov’s salivating dog.

My dive into cultural depravity began via TikTok clips of two crowd-working comedians — Aries Spears and Nate Jackson. Watching the entirety of any clip alerts the website’s algorithm to your so-called tastes and the faceless formula then spoon feeds you endless doses your chosen poison. My feed is quickly full of nothing but Spears and Jackson clips.

My scrolling habits are sometimes more high-minded — online New Yorker and Atlantic pieces, Italian language clips and moments of politics, science, psychology and nature. But alas, there’s also a Jerry Springer level of tastelessness: public flatulence and violent male fisticuffs, victims injured in slips off their front porches or pulling juvenile stunts on bicycles or skateboards. One moment of bad taste begets the next: fatal traffic accidents, Karens having public meltdowns, street interviews where beautiful young women (aka the Hawk Tuah Girl) haplessly discuss their sexual fetishes.

I am a slack-jawed motorist who cannot keep his eyes off a disturbing accident scene. I send the most-banal clips to two friends — both lawyers, as it turns out — who also revel in such immature locker-room humor. 

This free fall into depravity is like a nightly line of cocaine that I am compelled to share with friends. And in an endless cycle of bad taste, one sends me a stream of questionable clips in return.

Scroll. Tap. Scroll. Tap. Send. Repeat.

The other night, more than two hours have slipped by before I rescue my mind from this social media maw. I did not even sense them passing. Now too tired to do any kind of meaningful reading, I switch off the light to begin an agonizing 90 minutes of nervous tossing and turning.

I’m now suffering from so-called TikTok brain, a rapid-eye-movement sequence resulting from a barrage of unsettling and unconnected images that can reach PTSD proportions.

Then I wonder — and worry — why I can’t immediately fall into an easy restful sleep.

Our culture and numerous scientists acknowledge that social media is destroying the adolescent brain.

But what about overworked, overstimulated pseudo adults like me?

Last March, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published a book called “The Anxious Generation” that plumbs a dangerous social phenomenon: Today’s young are addicted to their iPhones.

Haidt’s book, which remains a bestseller, argues that the conversion to a smartphone-based, tablet-based childhood has undermined our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.

On average, teenagers spend five hours each day on social media, most of that time devoured by Youtube, TikTok and Instagram. Half of American teens now admit that they’re online almost constantly. Even when not staring into their smartphones, while in class or talking to friends or parents, they’re actually thinking about their next Snapchat post or some ongoing cyber drama that has imprisoned their fleeting attention span.

They have become unknowing pawns of major corporations that produce the apps that draw them in with the intent of selling their collected personal information online, turning teen addiction into immense profits.

Talk about a grim tableau. A recent Harris poll showed that half of Gen Z respondents, the first generation to grow up with social media woven into their lives, wish TikTok, Instagram and X were never invented. They feel trapped by social media. The number of teenagers who say their lives feel useless has more than doubled from 9% to 20% since 2010. 

But what about adults? Are they being equally bamboozled?

Today half of Americans over the age of 18 use social media more than two hours a day. An estimated 10%, or 33 million people, admit to being addicted to their smartphones.

On some night my smartphone time clocks in on an average teenager’s level.

Is this another sign of the decline of Western Civilization? Am I going to end up in a twelve-step program over my gnawing smartphone habit? 

My wife first noticed that for too much of our time together, I have my nose buried in my iPhone. At first, of course, I deny it.

Corporate America may have teenagers in its grasp, but not me. I’ve resisted money traps such as online gambling and cryptocurrency. I’ve lessened lifelong vices such as drinking and pot smoking, and don’t feel compelled to spend just because corporations hammer home messages on Christmas or Valentines Day.

But the more I think about it, I’m not so sure that I’m not in somebody’s pocket.

As a consumer, my best line of defense is at the store. I can say no to ice cream and chocolate I pass in super-market displays, but I am helpless once these temptations make their way into my home. I’m a sucker for anything I find in my refrigerator.

My smartphone is my closest companion. It never leaves my side. It knows me better than I know myself. It knows exactly what I want and how I want it. And there’s no end to the supply. I panic if I think I’ve misplaced it and reach for it absentmindedly, like an adult pacifier.

And that means I’m right where corporate America wants me. In recent months, I’ve found that I am reading fewer books. Magazines pile up unread. I seek out fewer soul talks with my life partner. 

I am no better than the teenage girls I criticize who can’t go five minutes without posting a selfie, the guy who keeps his bookie on speed dial or the cretins with blowup dolls in their closets, who hanker to rush in an era of AI sex bots.

Granted, recuperating from two hip replacements, recent months sequestered at home have posed a stern test of my addictive nature. Those lost COVID years also turned many more people into unwilling bedfellows with their bad social media habits.

So what can I do to save myself from TikTok brain? How can I resist the addictive siren’s song of the smartphone’s sensory bombardment? For teens, society is moving toward a total ban of smartphones at schools. But what about for adults like me?

For one, I must acknowledge the fact that current smartphone technology is a giant obstacle to my own sanity. I need to resist my shortening attention span — pausing movies or streaming shows to check sports scores or Facebook. Better yet, each night I get into bed, I must consciously choose to read a book and not waste even more hours on my smartphone.

After hours on social media, I don’t feel invigorated. I don’t feel satisfied. I just feel depressed.

My wife has discussed banning smartphone use after 6 p.m., but my brain secretly fears the painful withdrawal of going cold-turkey, even though I have already quit both Instagram and X and remain on Facebook and LinkedIn mostly for business reasons.

For now, I tell myself that, over morning coffee, it’s enough to check my New York Times app and maybe ESPN for a recap of the previous night’s games. And that’s it. Time, then, to move on, live life, have cerebral adventures that do not involve scrolling and tapping, chortling and sharing.

Yesterday, before logging onto my computer to do some writing, I find myself buying into some TikTok clip of a large crane dredging something from a deep canal. “Wait to see what it pulls up,” the video teases.

And so I watch the entire imbecilic clip. In the end, the thing pulled from the depths morphs into a huge human hand with its middle finger raised.

As always happens in the twisted realm of the smartphone, the joke is on me.

So consider this a newly-launched social experiment in how to rid myself of an addiction, my attempt to break off a relationship that is just not working anymore, one that has morphed from supportive to abusive.

I’ll be back in a month to report my findings.