Note to self: Stop checking the weather on your phone

.....butttttt it's right there!

So here’s a funny thing. About three years ago, I deleted all the social media apps from my phone and yet, I still catch myself tapping at this thing regularly. I’m not even doing anything, just poking at it in the same way a child, bored at the zoo, might poke at the glass in a reptile exhibit.

It got a bit ridiculous on Friday when I realized I’d checked the weather roughly a dozen times between 9am and noon. I have a thing about the weather. I’m one of those slightly-broken people where the weather can affect my mood if I let it. So anyway, I was obsessively checking the weather for the weekend and I realized IT WAS CURRENTLY SUNNY OUTSIDE.

The behavior was so absurd, so much like a circular Vonnegut joke, that I had to laugh at myself. Here I was — like a proper millennial idiot, I’d walked myself into a metaphor — standing under a clear blue bowl of sky and frowning at the clouds on my phone. Now, this isn’t a bit about anything as lame as being present in the moment, but if it was, this is probably where I’d bring the point home.

And it’s kind of not my fault that I do things like obsessively check the weather on my phone. Like, phones are amazing. The weather app is amazing. Within ten seconds, I can tell you whether it will snow in Paris next Wednesday. Or whether it will rain on Thursday in Timbuktu.

The question that picks at me is this: do I check the weather in place of Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or whatever? Is the behavior the same? I’m not getting the dopamine hit you get from social media. But I’m sure I’m still getting something by checking the weather. Seeing that simple, clean little screen with its thin numbers and organized just-so emojis. Let’s be real here. The weather app is sexy.

You think I’m being crazy, do you? Alright then, when do you check the weather on your phone in the morning? Is it right as you wake up, or do you roll over in bed first? Is it before you go to the bathroom or is it while you’re going to the bathroom? Because it sure as hell isn’t after that.

I look at my phone first thing in the morning, and again, this is a phone without any social media. I deleted all the apps. And yet my phone still weighs in my pocket like an albatross. Pick it out. Tap the screen. Check the weather. Open my email. Scroll the newsletters. Christ, it strikes me that I may be addicted to this thing. At the very least, it’s a habit.

But how much space is there between the word habit and the word addiction? Isn’t our every day just a structure of habits? I go to the gym every day. I read every day. I write in my notebook every day. I like those things — they make me feel better. Our habits aren’t always insidious, they keep us safe. Our addictions are the lizard-brained things we do between the habits.

All this is making me think of Camus, of a particular essay in which he advises traveling because, while traveling, “the curtain of habits … slowly rises, finally to reveal anxiety’s pallid visage. Man is face to face with himself.” A bit later, he writes that with our habits abandoned, “a great discord occurs between man and the things he sees. The music of the world finds its way more easily into this heart grown less secure.”

Now all that language might be a bit over the top. But it’s not totally inapplicable to my modern problem. Maybe my small and annoying habit of checking the weather on my phone isn’t blocking the music of the world from my heart. But I do believe it’s a subconscious habit aimed at keeping me from going face-to-face with myself and the world at-large.

This, by the way, is where I bring it home. This isn’t about being present in the moment as much as it’s about being face-to-face with myself. It might not always be easy, but watching those thoughts traipse in and out of my head, accustoming myself to their movement, is far more rewarding than stressing over a screen that always seems to offer glum predictions of the world and the weather.