Feeling very sick and incapable to drive, I parked my car illegally in a public parking lot that usually charges $3. I've done this before on the weekends, so I felt everything would be okay.
I was visiting my girlfriend who is about a 5 minute drive from me on campus.
Sitting in bed barely able to move, I realize how much my attention span had decreased. It felt weird to sit still for so long, I felt withdrawals from... something.
I had left my phone in my car. With a 102 fever and it being very cold outside, I had not interest in going to get it.
What I had realized over the past few weeks was that reading articles and subreddits about cryptocurrencies and constantly updating CoinMarketCap, was not actually making me a better person (or a wealthier one). I have a couple hundred dollars invested, but at the end of the day, as a broke college student with that little invested, there is not a crazy potential for huge gains. If I double or triple my money, I'll be happy, but I won't be a millionaire.
Being a Computer Science major, I'd be better off focusing my time on learning to develop applications on the blockchain... or studying for finals... or finishing my side project.
But no... the constant dopamine hits of looking at the exchange charts made me feel like I was already successful. It was a lie I was telling myself.
This is no different than the dopamine hits from the extensive use of Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, etc...
The problem is, when you have a phone, the second your mind cooks up something it needs to know (or is cooking up nothing at all), you pull your phone out to use it.
I've realized 75% of the time, the reason I pull out my phone is for very minuscule tasks. If I had just waiting 10 minutes, I would have forgot what I needed to check, lookup, email, post, etc.. meaning it probably wasn't important to begin with.
After 2 nights of staying at my girlfriends, I realized how much of a better listener and communicator I was without my phone around. While waiting for dinner to be ready, instead of checking the exchanges, Reddit, Facebook and Googling things on phone, I was communicating, and it felt easier to listen and take in the environment around me, since my attention span had already increased.
Lucky for me, my car got towed with my phone in it. I left my girlfriends and took a bus back home. Looks like I'll be without it for a little while longer.
