Phone Addiction & The Claw Hand – A Modern Curse

mobile phone addiction claw hand

Any of you lovely people out there feel like your arm is about to collapse into jelly and your hand is eventually going to morph into a claw? Perhaps your hand has already taken on a claw-like shape.

We are not bears, we don’t need hands (or paws) shaped like this, but no one seems to care. We all have our phones superglued to our hands so much that they feel like an extension of our own arm.

But the impending diagnosis of RSI and inability to move my arm is definitely starting to concern me. Has this concern encouraged me to put my phone down? Nope. I am a fool.

I’m definitely addicted to my phone, and so are plenty of other people. The trouble is that these days it’s quite difficult to notice you use your phone too much, because everyone else does too. But we shouldn’t measure ourselves based on others, we should be paying attention to our own lives, but we don’t.

We carry on swiping and swiping until our mind is pulsating and our arm can no longer hold our phone up. Then, we prop it up so we can continue to see our phones without the use of a limb. This is not cool people. How has it come to this?

I want to use my phone less, but I can’t. I try and quit Whatsapp, but then I miss plans and bridesmaid hen do planning, as well as loads of pointless messages.

I gave up Whatsapp after my phone broke, and after getting a new one, I think I lasted about two weeks before I caved and gave in to the peer pressure. I guess I should take it as a compliment that my friends can’t cope without talking to me.

Then there’s the social media browsing.

We can’t just wait around in the company of our own thoughts anymore. We have to fill gaps by scrolling through social media feeds on our phones.

This is a little tragic because not only do we miss out on little moments, or sometimes big ones, but it gets harder and harder to just be in our own company. Would it really be so bad if we had to wait for that appointment and just daydream? Or sit on a train and watch the world go by?

Another constant calling is the need to take pictures of every moment. We can’t be present during anything that happens these days, because we are always capturing it on our phones, or thinking that we should be taking a picture. You really can’t absorb the real beauty of these moments from behind a phone screen, it’s not the same as just witnessing it yourself.

Then, once you have captured said moment or pretty scenic view, you have to spend even more time editing it and posting it on Insta. Then how much more of your life are you missing?

No one really uses phones for their real purpose much anymore. To speak to people. We don’t speak. We message.

Of course, I call my best friends often, but I definitely Whatsapp them more. This means that a lot of the time when you see each other you don’t really have any news to report, because you have already shared every snippet of your life via Whatsapp.

I miss the days when I didn’t see friends for a few weeks and then had loads to catch up on. Now, if they haven’t told you personally yourself, they will have let you know by updating their Facebook status.

What the hell would someone from 15 years ago say after reading all the above? They would be absolutely baffled. Why would we want to spend over a quarter of every single day on our phones? If we add up the time we spend on our phones daily, the results would probably be horrifying.

If an injured arm and a hand shaped like a claw isn’t enough of a wake-up call, then what is? What is it going to take for us to cut down our phone usage?

I’m not criticising others, because everything I have mentioned here I do too. I’m at a loss myself as to how I am going to change, without going to mobile phone addiction anonymous, which should be a real thing by the way. I am not the minority, I’m the majority.

What’s really frustrating is that although I know I need to change my habits. At the moment I don’t think I can. The only way to do it is to have a fully phone free day. But then what if there’s an emergency and someone needs to contact me?

That’s just another excuse. Just swap your phone with someone, so they can answer any important calls for you, and filter out all the crap. Sunday is a good day to try this, so maybe I will give it a go. We already have a loose no phones policy on Sundays, but it’s not policed enough. So here’s to doing it properly.

I do not want to turn my hand into a claw, do you?

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