On Chemical Dependency
It’s past midnight and I’m laying in bed staring at the ceiling in the dark of my bedroom. Instead of sleeping, I’m having a conversation with myself: don’t look at your phone, just go to sleep.
By writing this, it’s obvious which voice won.
It’s this type of nagging feeling that pesters me to avoid silence at all costs. The silence where you sit and do nothing, where you aren’t engaged with anything in a cognitive sense.
In essence, being bored.
This struggle is present almost every part of the day without fail. Waking up, driving, eating, working, exercising, relaxing, or trying to sleep. Almost none of these activities can be performed without staring at what I’ve nicknamed the Soul Siphon: a screen.
My work as an analyst makes it worse because everything revolves around screens. My studies involve a screen. My leisure activities involve a screen. It all involves a screen. It’s an addiction. It hurts when I go without it. And I hate it.
Addiction
I used to believe that addiction only applied when a chemical substance was involved. That made it easy to dismiss phone use as just a bad habit. But the unfortunate truth is that the chemical is generated inside us, triggered by the natural mechanisms of the human body.
Even worse, this particular addiction has been normalized across society. Everywhere you look, whether it be at red lights, in grocery lines, and even during meals people are filling every iota of pause with their phones.
There are plenty of absurd analogies you could make. Imagine if everyone stared at a rock in the same way, or casually drank alcohol from sunrise to midnight, every single day. That’s what it looks like when you step back.
But addressing this reality usually gets brushed aside so the “regularly scheduled activity” can resume. People know it's a concern, agree it's a concern, and then dismiss it because they're too dependent to truly let it go and look beyond.
It’s as if a door is right in front of us, hiding the truth, and the thought of opening it fills us with anxiety. The only way to soothe that discomfort is by stacking these distractions between ourselves and the door.
Silence
These distractions only serve one purpose: avoiding silence.
Silence is uncomfortable because it forces us to face ourselves when there's nothing else to focus on. Our memories, regrets, anxieties, and the thoughts we’d rather suppress all begin to rise. Yet simultaneously, it’s also the very place where wisdom and healing can be found.
In silence, we’re able to reflect. We can walk a thought all the way down its path and see where it leads, instead of drowning it out. Most importantly, silence teaches us to listen.
For the quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.
And yet, facing what you might hear in that space is so frightening that most people dive into distraction instead. The phone becomes a shield, a way to avoid the encounter. But no replacement activity can fully solve this issue.
The path forward is in embracing the discomfort of silence.
Embracing It
There’s a practice within prayer and meditation that I’ve taken to calling Void Meditation. It’s simple but difficult: intentionally stripping away all external noise while also quieting the inner noise.
The goal isn’t to think, but to be. To enter silence and remain there. In that space, you are better positioned to experience His voice. If you endure it, the silence becomes a kind of reward in itself.
The screen, the Soul Siphon, keeps you from ever reaching this state. I know the discomfort firsthand and have experienced success with this prayer method.
But the truth is simple:
Let it go. Embrace the silence.
Thank you,
~Austin
