Why do I lose so much time every time I pick up my phone?

Rabbi Landau answers with his own question: “You paid for the phone. Why does it feel like it owns you?” You open it to do one thing. Twenty minutes later “you have done everything except that thing, and you still call that using your phone? Who's using whom?” You think you're choosing what to watch, “but someone else designed what comes next and how easy it is to keep watching.”

He points out a contradiction. “Your phone asks permission to use your camera, your microphone, your location. When did you give it permission to use you?” You buy a case and set a password so no one steals your phone. But when the phone takes hours of your life, “you unlock it again.”

He quotes Shlomo HaMelech: “A person without self-restraint is like a city without walls. Your phone has a password. What protects you?” He ends with a warning: maybe the phone's smartest trick is convincing you that picking it up was your idea, “because the easiest person to control is the one who thinks every impulse is his own decision. Next time your hand reaches your phone, who made the first move?”

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

You open your phone for one thing and lose twenty minutes, because someone else designed what comes next.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

Why do we protect the phone more than our own time?

We buy a case and set a password so nobody steals the phone, but when it takes hours of our life, we unlock it again.

Underlying need or longing

Shlomo HaMelech teaches, “Ir pertzuah ein chomah, ish asher ein ma'tzar lerucho”: a person without self-restraint is like a city without walls. A person needs walls of his own.

Deepest human truth

Rabbi Landau warns that the easiest person to control is the one who thinks every impulse is his own decision.

More questions from this teaching

• Am I really the one choosing what I watch on my phone?