[ryandrake]

As someone who miraculously doesn’t feel this urge to constantly “check” his phone, I have to ask: what are you people “checking” for, exactly? It’s still there—it hasn’t gone anywhere. Is it the notifications? Why not just turn them off? I can assure you that there’s nothing on your phone that can’t wait an hour or so until the movie is done.

Out of 10,000 people “checking” their phones, probably around 1 of them is actually waiting for something urgent and important. The rest are doing it out of pure addiction.

[duskdozer]

Everything wants to hijack your attention via your phone now, whether it's apps spamming notifications or companies spamming SMS. And arguably every once in a while there is something you would like to know quickly, but any channel that comes on just gets abused by cruft.

If it's addiction, it's addiction through exploitation.

[graemep]

I think checking your phone unless you are actually expecting an important notification is a symptom of the problem we are discussing here.