Fits nicely with the Southpark creators views on Pot: it makes you feel fine with being bored and it's when you're bored that you should be learning a new skill or some new science or being creative.
Smartphones and everything that comes with it are more dangerous in that regard, in that a lot of activities on there are designed to give you a sense of accomplishment - finishing a level, getting an award, getting upvotes on the internets, winning at something, being moderately entertained by an endless stream of memes, dog / cat videos, etcetera. It's a continuous stream of short lived distractions.
Disclaimer: I use the phone all the time, Reddit takes up a lot of my attention. That said, I managed to sit down and read a book for a bit yesterday.
You always have your mind. Are you incapable of just sitting and thinking about things? Do you need constant external stimulation?
There's a famous quote from Blaise Pascal that goes "All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room."
I wonder if someone like Richard Feynman would have accomplished anything at all if he had a phone to distract him and he was incapable of simply sitting and thinking. Einstein came up with the central ideas of the Theory of Relativity while he was day-dreaming at work or on public transport.
Yeah. Human mind is very limited tool without external support. That's why writing was such a boon for humans and notation was such a boon for math.
> Are you incapable of just sitting and thinking about things?
Yeah. I can but that rarely acomplishes anything. If you think you can solve a problem just with your mind think again. Most problems are problems because you lack some information. And you won't get any missing information just by thinking. And if you have all the information, you just need to process it then you are still out of luck. Even moderately complex processing let's say roughly as hard as derivating moderately simple calculus requires at least a pen and piece of paper to support you wonderful mind with crappy operational memory that can hold at most seven things at once.
I would much rather do the thinking with my phone than without it.
You can't daydream if you must focus your attention on something boring. I wonder if Einstein would have come up with Relativity if he had to write mind-numbing reports all day.
You can accomplish all kinds of things with your mind.
Not to mention most people fight "boredom" with endless surfing at places where they have all the tools to accomplish tons of things -- in their home, in from of a screen.