[Rotdhizon]

What you described is precisely what's not happening though. In that there are no consequences to my frequent phone checking. If I'm playing a game and waiting for a match to start for example, it's not affecting me negatively in any way to just open youtube and watch a quick video. That's one of my points here; in that enjoying smartphones and being addicted to them gets muddled.

[jclos]

It's not affecting in ways that you notice right now, but we don't really know the true effects of never letting your brain be bored.

There is some evidence that boredom is good for you as explained in this post: http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170719-how-moments-of-bor...

[jdironman]

Not to mention the people who 'have' to check while say operating machinery. Also, tallied up the time spent checking / browsing the phone or devices which could be used either for rest or learning a new skill, or even just being bored as you suggest.

[majormajor]

If you're checking your phone when you're bored than it seems like you are getting bored still.

Maybe you'd be better off reading a book, or coming up with a creative solution to some big problem, but thinking back to pre-smartphone decades, that's not really what people were doing.

There's a significant difference between people who have replaced their previous time-waster go-tos with phones and people who are truly addicted, and the public discussion has done an absolutely shitty job of distinguishing these things.

The poster above said "when I'm at home," which doesn't exactly specify if it's diversion or addiction, but seems more like the former to me.

[rando444]

>In that there are no consequences to my frequent phone checking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_overuse#Health

There's a reason that the first step in addiction therapy is getting the subject to be able to admit that there's a problem.