“While many of us may feel like we have unhealthy relationships with the screens, notifications, and platforms in our lives, the very concept of technology addiction is controversial.”
– Charlie Warz in Inside How A 12-Step Recovery Program For Social Media Addiction Works Buzzfeed News
Doctors don’t recognize technology addiction for the simple reason that they are themselves addicts in the denial stage. For my soon-to-be ex-husband, a highly-regarded guardian of evidence-based medicine, it began with mistaking skepticism for a method and taking the absence of evidence for evidence of absence—two premises of the scientism commonly taken for science.
When the first smartphones came out, of the two of us, I was the early adopter. Soon enough, he too had the latest phone, and eventually hundreds of apps. At work, his phone calls became international video conference calls that might take place at any time of the day or night. The screen-intensive life quickly became our new normal.
During family dinners out, he would be on his phone instead of visiting with his adult children and me. I chalked it up to his being hard of hearing. Not long after, he couldn’t tell the weather while standing in the rain unless his phone said it was raining. Then, in the evenings, he would sit on the sofa, remote in hand, large-screen television blaring, laptop on his lap, his phone beside him–and sleep. The only way to wake him up was to take away the remote control.
When I started to get to the bottom of my chronic illness, and he couldn’t find mention of that illness on his phone, he denied my findings and—after my over twenty years of suffering—claimed that I had never been ill. When I refused to let him drug me with antipsychotics, he abandoned me, and proved willing to dispense with any holiday gatherings and to spend any amount of money to avoid being parted from his devices.
For my husband, the promise of technology remains fresh and the computer is always right. It’s life that’s wrong. End of family.
I am grateful to him for supporting me economically as I soldier on alone, trying to think things through and to share solutions with others who are suffering. That doesn’t pay. Blind adherence to computer-based algorithms for doing technology to people pays—even when technology is the problem.