You vs Phone. Who Will Win?

You vs Phone . Who Will Win? A musical method to take your attention back! How many seconds can you sit still and focus on your breathing, without your mind wandering? If you’re like most people nowadays, your answer to that question is somewhere under 10 seconds. Seriously. And that’s the “new normal”. Ever since the neolithic revolution, when humans first began to live in an unnatural way, we’ve had restless minds. Buddhists call this the monkey-mind, but I think we can update that to the scrolling-mind. While short attention spans have been a problem for a long time, the issue has gotten exponentially worse since the invention of smart phones. It’s horrifying how addicted most people are to their phones! And nobody’s talking about this, because it’s the “new normal”. But it’s not normal, and we need to stop pretending that it’s okay to waste our one precious life staring at screens. Nobody on their death bed will ever wish they spent more time scrolling on their phone. Perhaps you’re thinking: What I spend my time doing is my business! On the surface, that sounds fair enough. But when we explore this issue at a deeper level, we realize that phone addiction is not only ruining our lives, it’s ruining our societies, too. When we can’t focus for more than a few seconds, we can’t create anything worthwhile. And you can see where this is heading… Most people are addicted to consuming content on their phones, which means most people can’t focus long enough to create anything. So what happens when there’s a never-ending demand for new content, but there’s nobody to create it. No problem, says AI. Yep, we’re about to enter a new reality where robots are the “creators”, and humans are the consumers. How screwed up is that?! And then, what happens next?

You can listen to You vs Phone. Who Will Win? online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

You vs Phone. Who Will Win? is an episode from Hack Music Theory by Ray Harmony.

This episode is 8:41 long.

This episode was published on Nov 21, 2025.

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