Gabriela Nguyen: I think what culture shift has happened has really just come from an extreme level of that sort of digital malaise that we kind accept. It’s just part of the modern life and that kind of seemingly passive and harmless acceptance that has just gotten to a point where Gen Z’s like, all right, maybe we cannot ignore that anymore.

Mark Oppenheimer: Hello friends. I’m Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Arc: The Podcast which, okay, if you really want to twist my arm, you can call it Arc with Mark. We are the podcast of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. We’re also the podcast affiliated with Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, which is the online magazine at arcmag.org.

This week, an interview with Gabriela Nguyen, who is the young, 20-something founder of Appstinence, which is a website but also a technique for breaking your addiction to your iPhone apps or your smartphone apps. It’s really more of a movement. It’s a website, a system, and a movement. And I think that Gabriela Nguyen…is it too much to call it our prophet? It’s probably too much to call our prophet, but I think that she is a really important thinker in the techno-skeptical space, and we do get into the question of how her own Roman Catholic upbringing did or didn’t influence her feelings about how people really ought to live, which is not addicted to machines.

This is a topic I go to a lot, but I think that Gabriela brings something really new to it and it’s a super fun conversation. When I was thinking about Gabriela, I thought she has that sort of conundrum that Audrey Lorde discussed in her essay that you can’t use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. And of course she’s talking about racial injustice, but it’s the logic that when you’re trapped inside some sort of ideological system or even a commercial or market system, that it’s so hard to break out of it without using its assumptions applies in a lot of areas of our life.

And when I think about trying to get, say, teenagers less addicted to apps, social media, whatever, how do you get the message to them unless you’re going through apps, social media. We’re trapped inside what Paul Kingsnorth, whose book I’m currently reading, calls the machine. You’re just trapped inside it. It’s not just an ideology, it’s not just an economic system. It’s sort of everything. And definitely the internet is that for most of us. So trying to power off it but still get the message to people who are on it all the time is a really interesting, almost game theory problem, and Gabriela Nguyen is the person to talk to us about it. Here’s the first part of our conversation. Have a listen.

Gabriela, it’s so good to talk with you. How are things in Vietnam?

GN: Very well. The weather is stunning. I grew up coming here every summer and it was always boiling hot, but now it’s really, really nice. I was telling people, “Ugh, I’m going to somewhere that’s so hot,” and telling my friends on the East Coast that I’m going to a place much hotter than yours. But that ended up being a complete lie. It’s so beautiful.

MO: We should have expensed a trip to Vietnam to do this with you live. I mean, what are budgets for if not that?

In the interview that ran in Arc, you talked about having grown up with all this technology. Now, I’m 50, and you’re what about half my age? How old are you?

GN: I just turned 24.

MO: Alright, so we’ll call it half my age, we’ll call it 0.5M. And you talked about how you grew up, not just with this technology, but in Silicon Valley, right? I mean this was literally the air you breathe. What was that like growing up in the aughts in the place that was pumping this stuff out?

GN: I don’t know if this is necessarily a positive or a negative yet. I think I need a little time to think about it more, but it feels exactly like it does now with AI. So I was born in the early 2000s and then my sense of technology change, and the smartphone came out 2007, social media gets really, really popular, sort of very early 2010s and gets us to where we’re now. But there was no moment where it was sort of all right, this was the moment the entire world changed.

I mean as you guys remember sort of chat gt coming out and everyone’s like, “Oh, this is going to change the world.” And now we kind of feel like, alright, we kind see it slowly being integrated, but we are not quite at the point where we’re realizing how much of a change AI has already brought in and will bring to society. And it was the exact cookie cutter situation when social media came out.

So when I make that comparison, that’s why I talk about why we need to be so extra critical and have an extra sharp eye to what exactly is happening with AI and how it’s being integrated into daily life. Because we made that mistake with social media where we thought, well, the big thing, the big scary thing is going to come, but right now it’s okay. Right now it’s okay. And then time keeps going on and going on, and then here we are, “We’re like, wait, what happened?” And then ten, fifteen years passes by and we’re like, “Wait, when did the bad scary thing happen?” It’s like, well, there was no point. But that is, in part, what the big scary thing was, it’s that there was no point
MO: There’s no point where you realize how big and scary it is, it just gets slowly bigger–it doesn’t get scary. It just sort of gets bigger until it’s all around you.

But you must have had a point where you realized that this wasn’t for you and that part of your life’s work was going to be helping to claw back a lifetime that you never knew that I knew growing up, but that you didn’t. Was there a damaging moment? Was there some sort of moment where you thought, wait a second, this has gone too far and I want to change? I mean for me, I do have a moment when I realized I wanted to get off of all social media and I did. Did you have a moment when you had a vision of the better life?

GN: Yes, I did. But I think for me, and the reason why my personal journey with getting off of social media from having had it full time chronically online and Gen Z, so I had a smartphone from very early on. I had all the different types of social media, several hours a day, et cetera, but still what they consider high functioning and now it’s going through life and doing well in school and good relationships otherwise. The reason why it took me so long was because I didn’t have what you probably see moreso in headlines when a young woman talks about what it was like for her to be on social media and when she had that moment where she realized things were wrong, and it’s typically it was a very obvious moment. So it was a particular group of friends, she was getting cyber bullied, or oftentimes you hear about eating disorders, or you hear about increased instances in girls going to psych wards and things like that. It’s sort of a more clean cut situation.

In my case, I didn’t have any of those extreme situations and that in part was the reason was part of the harm for me was that it took me so long because I couldn’t pin it. There was no, again, sort of analogously to the way that social media didn’t feel like anything so much at the time when it was very much a thing in the sort of late 2000s or early 2010s is I couldn’t pin it to anything. So when I try to think about what was the kind of aha moment that if it were to be turned into a headliner story or something, and there wasn’t one that was grand slam, greater than all the other moments. It was one moment, but then there was a very close second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth moment. So I would say if there was one that I picked though it was the most mundane moment.

I was just trying to do homework as a fourteen-, fifteen-year-old and it was getting particularly late and I couldn’t stop looking at my phone. That was it. That was the whole moment. But it was that same moment again and again and again and again until some point the camel’s back breaks, right? There’s just last straw, after last straw, after last straw. But then that was the focus thing, but there was also a bit of how I can notice it changing my self-perception at the time I’m a teenager, so body image and that kind of stuff, and it was sort of death by a thousand cuts. But then realizing that death by a thousand cuts is still death, and I didn’t need to have that kind of grand moment to be like, “Oh, this was the big breakaway moment.” And I think that is the case for a lot of people. I mean even statistically speaking, most people who use these platforms aren’t going to have a huge sort of moment.

MO: Right. It slowly creeps up with them. By the way, hearing you talk about death by a thousand cuts, that actually sounds like an unusually painful way to go. You’d almost rather have your head lopped off, just thinking of the metaphor. The thousand cut sounds actually quite terrible and is, because what it is is the slow accretion of day after day, your day being a little bit worse until your life is just kind of being controlled by these machines, by these apps. So I think that’s in some ways what’s so sad about the way that technology can take over our life that this slow draining of vitality from our minutes, our hours, our days rather than a one terrible thing.

GN: Right, and I think that’s in particular the case with the younger generations, so Gen Z and Gen Alpha using these platforms is that you use it from the very beginning of your life, so you lack the point of reference. I think when I talk to older people who join the appstinence movement, and they are, I mean older as millennial and above in this case, it’s much easier for them to have to, I think the idea of appstinence sort of latches on a bit maybe more quickly because they realize, well, I actually spent the first twenty, thirty, forty, sometimes fifty years of my life without any of these things, so oh, I just have to remember what I already knew as opposed to, what I was saying in the interview with Caroline, having to create this new world and then someone has to give you the little bits and pieces and then you have to exploit. It’s a whole sort of self-development journey to be able to remember what life was like, it’s fun, but it’s much more difficult.

MO: Yeah. Your movement is wonderfully titled appstinence. I hope there was a moment where you thought, “Oh, that’s a great name for it.” There’s no better punning name for what you want to do than appstinence. What is appstinence? It’s a website, it’s an idea, it’s a movement. Can you tell us how you came up with it and what it is?

GN: Yeah, I think first and foremost, it is an idea. So it’s the idea of not using any sort of personal social media accounts and instead making an intentional effort to of course see people in person. But when you do use technology, use direct line communication. So that would be video calls, phone calls, text messages, getting away from anything that has an infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithms. Essentially what people did just before what my generation did to socialize and realizing that we don’t need to wait for the next, let’s say Mark Zuckerberg, to come along and finally create that technology that allows us to keep in touch with people. I do believe that the technology that we’re waiting for has already come with video call, phone calls, group chats, direct text messages. The simpler the better. That’s at the core what appstinence is.

But I think it’s a little bit gray. The definition is a little bit gray around the edges because naturally, if you’re not using social media to connect, you don’t have your, say Mark Oppenheimer’s, Instagram account. It also changes all the other things that you would use social media for. So say you don’t want to have social media, or to keep in touch with people you want to really make an effort to give people a phone call. You’re also escaping sort of the main portal in which tons of information that you don’t need to know gets to you. That changes a whole other host of things outside of just your personal relationships.

MO: One of the things I like about what you say is you are very conscious that you’re giving up a lot when you get off social media. I have to say, let me push back, and this might be because I’m older and my friends came up in a time when it wasn’t weird to get a phone call, but when I got off social, it must be ten years ago now, I was actually astonished at how little changed because by that point the Facebook feed was so junky and there was so little news from friends, it was so much ads. And also the friends who had once posted news were now just posting endless articles that I could get if I went to the Times website,, or a local news website or whatever. So I actually was amazed at how much I didn’t lose. I mean, the things I lost were the kind of weak link news items.

So the friend who I otherwise never talked to, the sort of fiftieth best friend I had who I didn’t know it was his birthday anymore or I didn’t know that she was even getting divorced, or had lost a loved one, but you know what? She was my fiftieth best friend. I still knew everything about my ten or twenty closest people. I still knew everything about my family. It’s not like I didn’t know what news was going on in the world.

I guess I’m curious what is a worst case scenario because I didn’t find that I lost much at all. But are there people who all of a sudden then go into a total news vacuum about their friends, about the world, who simply can’t imagine how to access news from a website, or knowledge of friends from a phone call? Is it that bad for some people?

GN: I think in the larger narrative of getting off social media and oh, whatcha losing, what do you get? What we consider losing and what we consider getting are oftentimes flipped. So, concretely, if I have an Instagram account and then I delete that Instagram account, you could say in terms of the language that I’m losing awareness of all the things in the news in international news that I would normally get on my feed, but then I see that as getting back the time and the focus for whatever would then displace the information that I then am otherwise not getting. So essentially that we still are kind of going with this sort of old narrative that the more information the better, and getting information is necessarily gaining and not having information is necessarily losing. So I actually think it’s the reverse. I actually think that you gain a lot by not having all of that additional information. So that’s the first thing.

The sort of other mini answer is that what I discuss when I say sort of getting off of social media and in particular this is an issue I’ve noticed with clients I coach who are Gen Z, is the social atrophy from either never or rarely ever using those sort of social fitness muscles that older generations needed to use when you didn’t have social media to sort buttress mediate your relationships. And so when you get off of social media, you realize you’re left with these really weak or non-existent social muscles. And so an example of that would be if I’m using TikTok to keep in touch with my friends where we send Tiktoks back and forth, which is something I would do all the time when it had it, we would a TikTok chain, and then I get off of it. I then don’t have the inclination, the social memory, or the social fitness to remember that if this person take their phone number, find their phone number, type it in, or click the contact, give them a phone call, wait for the phone to ring, and then go through all of those steps it takes to then actually make contact with the person, then you are always used to having these mediators, and then you don’t then use the other habits.

I actually noticed since I’ve been here in Vietnam, my grandparents have incredibly strong social muscles because they’re almost in their nineties and they have just always been used to the idea that if you want to maintain a social circle, you have to put in the effort to do it.

MO: When you announced that you were getting off your apps, I mean is this something you did in high school? What was the period where you were telling friends, I’m not going to be on TikTok anymore. Was it a short period, long period and how old were you?

GN: So I started it when I was fourteen years old. So it was my freshman year of high school, which is when I had that first, alright, something’s got to change, but it really wasn’t until I was twenty-three that I would consider myself to have been fully appstinent. In my case, I got off of it slowly over eight years. I got off of it slowly and I had, for half of those years, probably if not more, a very toxic relationship where I was kind of deleting it and then I would redownload it.

In my defense, the pandemic was going on at the time, so that was the time that people were using social media more anyway, so I was deleting it then redownloading, back and forth, back and forth, until finally over eight years where I’m adjusting other things around in my social life and in my personal life that are making it easier to stay off social media as those incrementally over eight years as you can imagine are getting stronger. Finally then I sort of kicked the habit and then I went off of it.

MO: What was some of the negative blowback you got? I have to imagine that some friends or now in your work, some critics of your work are telling you this is selfish, how dare you opt out, it’s a luxury, it’s a privilege. Some people need this, or just it’s not that bad anyway. What are the various kinds of criticisms you’ve gotten and from whom?

GN: Well, so the first thing is I was surprised at how little criticism, in terms of the strength of the criticism, or how robust the criticism was in general, I think that surprises me a bit that I thought I would get more. But I think we are at a point in the conversation and it’s a point in the conversation around in particular youth mental health and social media where a lot of Gen Z are looking for other answers outside of what has already been given to them, which is sort of like algorithm hacking, digital detoxes, all those kinds of things, mindfulness practices, that kind of stuff. But I also think the actual technology itself, especially now with AI being integrated more obviously in social media and all the AI slop and things that people are seeing and things with the administration and then all this, the political side of the internet is getting more political than it was before.

People are extra ready for another answer. Something that seems more extreme, but I think people are realizing is not an overcorrection overcorrection, it’s actually the drastic measure that needs to be taken in drastic time. So that’s one thing, but for the pushback that I do get is more so sort of honestly, hey, maybe I have this kind of subquestion as opposed necessarily a criticism or pushback. One would be the one I said, which is that is this kind of an overcorrection? And then I sort say that I don’t think it’s because if it was, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.

And the other one and sort of saying, some people need this. I understand that people use it to run their business and there are other reasons that justify the use of social media in particular. Appstinence is for what you would think of your everyday Gen Z, eighteen, nineteen-year-old. They’re using it for self-development and keeping in touch with their friends. The vast majority are not using it to run a business, or to make incredible substantial social change, or something like that. So that at it’s core what appstinences is for your personal relationships, what I would’ve given to myself when I was fourteen years old.

MO: One of the really interesting things you said in the interview that we did over at arcmag.org is that a lot of people get off and don’t give it enough time, so they get back on within a week and say, I was so agitated and I was annoyed and I was lonely and I was sad. You make the point that that’s to be expected given that it’s an addiction and it takes time to detox from an addiction.

GN: Right, so the 5D method is what at Appstinence we use to help coach people to get off of social media. Part of what informs that process is research around sort of addiction recovery. And one of the criticisms, I know that Jonathan Henigan has also talked about this as I mentioned in the other interview, but he does also talk about that a lot of these studies sort of do okay, well we check back with them in a week, or ten days, or something. But Dr. Anna Lembke, who is an addiction researcher out of Stanford, she talks in her book Dopamine Nation, where she talks about the amount of time it actually takes to rewire your reward setting, and it’s much longer than the least week long studies would seem to conclude. And so you do need to give it that extra time. One thing I would probably add on to that is even once the withdrawal period is over, I do notice that with clients that I work with, that there is more adjustment outside of just dealing with the withdrawal that is necessary.

And I think in part that’s an indictment of the issue of how embedded social media is in the younger generation that you’re having to take actually quite a bit longer than that, say three or weeks or one month to actually rebuild parts of your life. Because when you remove the social media, it leaves you with a lot of questions, a lot of considerations, sort of who do I care about, what do I like to do? Or how do I think time should be spent? Or there’s all these things and questions that are avoided when you decide, I’m not going to think about this. And then you just scroll on social media.

MO: Right. Well, I was going to say one of the things that happens if you get three or four hours back in your day is you have to have stuff that you know want to do with it. My sense, and I’m thinking here in particular about some younger people I know, some teenagers I know of, is that they think that being on social media and doing the various things you can do online, maybe playing video games with someone else who’s remote, but online with them, or being on social media, or sending tiktoks back and forth, they think that that’s what one does with one’s time. And if you take that away, they don’t actually have in-person hangs that they want to do. They don’t have sports practices they want to go to, they don’t know what to do. Is that an overly drastic assessment of things, or are there people who really have to build up a sense of what one does with time?

GN: I don’t think that’s an overstatement. I have actually come across quite a few times, and this was probably quite far in the beginning of when I started doing this work, but I would say maybe elder millennials and above talking about their children when the parents decide, I’m not going to let my kids have all these sort of endless technology, and then the kids sort of ask, what am I supposed to then do? And then the parents are absolutely horrified by the idea that a child, sort of at peak imagination in one’s life, cannot figure out what to do to spend your time. So I remember that was even also I think in the media a little bit of sort of an amusing headline that I would see once in a while, I think. But that was one thing.

I think even just talking to my peers, I think, and I covered this in one essay that I wrote, but when I talked about sort the cookie cutter conversation, I always have when someone, I meet a new person and they want to keep in contact so they say, “Oh, can have your Instagram.” And I say, “Oh, I don’t have one, but I can give you my phone number.” And then we get to this sort of very brief conversation around, “Oh, good for you that you don’t have Instagram. That’s great. I wish I could do that.” And then we start talking about, similar conversation to the one that you and I are having, but then oftentimes in that conversation it’s also, it’s sort of this very genuine, genuine curiosity around then what do you do otherwise? And it’s not done in a sort of, do you think you’re better than me kind of way that I think I get the impression that some people might think that other people think that I’m feeling like I’m better than.

MO: No, but they’re genuinely curious.

GN: They’re genuinely curious.

MO: They’re a little bit in awe of you. They want to learn.

GN: They want to learn. It’s genuinely curious what it’s that you do just spend the time. Because I think part of it is also, I can imagine why saying you’re off social media, it’s typically probably aligned with also avoiding other kinds of persuasive design, addictive technology. So in addition, that takes up even more of the hours out to do other things.

MO: Is there a community growing up around this? I mean in my own journeys, because I’m so interested in this topic, have talked to you and I would say maybe half a dozen other people of your generation, more or less, who are opting out of social media, or various pieces of it, but are in some way, let’s just say tech skeptic. I’m wondering if there’s a movement building. It’s very hard to know because so many of the movements that the reporters cover, they cover by just logging onto social, right? The sense of what a movement is, what are people talking about on Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, or whatever. So it’s almost hard to know where to find the movement if it were a movement against those platforms.

Do you have a sense that, I mean obviously there’s growing skepticism of iPhones in schools, for example, that has been well covered and you can measure it because you can see bans on phones at schools. But do you have a sense that there’s a cultural shift happening and if so, where does one look for it?
GN: So I definitely do think that there is a cultural shift happening. I think in great part it is driven by older generations who are very concerned for their children. But on the end of Gen Z, being responsible for ourselves, I think what culture shift has happened is really just come from an extreme level of that digital malaise that we kind of accept it part of modern life and that kind of seemingly passive and harmless acceptance that has just gotten to a point where Gen Z’s like, alright, maybe we cannot ignore that anymore. And so that reminds me of, for example, there was some new research, they came out from the Pew Research Center, they did surveys with teenagers, and the majority are finding that, yeah, it’s actually not good for my productivity. Yeah, it’s actually not good for various other metrics of my wellbeing. So there’s this sentiment growing amongst teenagers and other Gen Z that this is not the way to go.

But like you said, it is kind of hard to measure in some sense because sort of subcultures that are embracing this cultural shift, it’s fractured. I think that there’s not yet sort of one huge unifying force, and I think I’ve talked with another researcher about this before, but why is it that there has yet to be something, perhaps a movement as great as one might expect there to be? And I think honestly, I just think the grip that these technologies have, not just on sort the person lives of Gen Z, but they’re so deeply embedded in many other factors of modern society that is very difficult as you can imagine, to kind of, it’s much harder to pick glass out of a wound than if you just have one huge piece of glass in your hand. If social media was all out bad and net negative for every single way that it’s used, I would imagine it probably would be significantly easier to deal with it. But because it’s justified at certain times than not at other times, I think that’s the reason why it’s becomes so difficult.

MO: Friends, if you’ve listened this far, and let’s face it, there are other things you could be doing, there’s a lot of TV to binge, there’s terrestrial radio if that’s your thing, there are other podcasts, there’s gardening to be done, and yet you’re still here listening, I think that means you like it and we would love for you to subscribe. Please go to Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or YouTube, and just become a regular listener to our podcast. Every additional subscriber helps. And while you’re at it, why don’t you go to the rating sites of those podcast platforms and just leave us an incredibly over-the-top, ridiculous, obsequious five star rating that would just make me super duper happy.

Over at arcmag.org, our so-called print, our written version, arc mag.org, you should go take a look. We have such interesting stuff up for one thing, we have an extended interview by our intern Caroline Coffey with Gabriela Nguyen. We also have an interview with Julius Krein, the sort of postliberal conservative national greatness thinker who edits at the magazine American Affairs, which is pretty well beloved of a lot of people in the Trump right. We have a review of Brian Eno’s book about the importance of art. Brian Eno, of course, record producer to everyone from Talking Heads to Coldplay, you name it. And then another great piece we’ve recently posted is Carlos Ruiz Martinez’s article about how many undocumented Catholics are skipping mass rather than risk the threat of ice showing up at their mass. So incredible stuff over at arcmag.org.

I know you come to rely on my calendar of religious holidays, only a couple major world religious holidays coming up. In the next few weeks, Catholics will celebrate the Feast of the Assumption, which celebrates Mary, mother of Jesus, being bodily ascended into heaven. Then the Hindu holiday of Krishna Janmashtami is observed August 16th, and this is a holiday that celebrates the birth of Krishna, who’s the eighth avatar of Vishnu, and that’s for everyone in the Hindu world. So go celebrate some Feast of Assumption, celebrate some Krishna Janmashtami. Why don’t you merge the holidays? Maybe you could celebrate them both at once.

You could also celebrate some celebrity birthdays this week. Steve Wozniak, the lesser known co-founder of Apple Turns 75. Joe Rogan turns, wait, guess how old do you think he is? He’s 58. I think I would’ve put him a little bit younger. I don’t know. Robert De Niro turns 82 next week. Belinda Carlisle turns 67 and Sean Penn turns 65. I’m going to stop right there because Belinda Carlisle and Sean Penn, in very different ways, are both, they’re important to any kid who grew up in the eighties and nineties, so happy birthday to them both. And again, please go subscribe at Arc: The Podcast on Apple, Spotify or iTunes. And now back to my interview with Gabriela Nguyen.

I am sort of amazed by your wisdom at age 14 to look at your phone and say, “Wait, this is making it harder for me to do my homework,” and to start this process that took eight years of getting off of these apps. Are you somebody who is otherwise, and you can interpret this however you like, but are you somebody who is otherwise inclined to see the world in quirky or eccentric ways? Are you somebody who’s, I don’t even know what that would mean. Are you interested in certain periods in the past? Are you into Ren fairs? I don’t know. Are you just somebody who one would expect would have a more eccentric take on technology than the average fourteen-year-old?

GN: I really don’t think so. I think so. When I think about how it felt at the time when I was fourteen, I really don’t think that I was sort of particularly wise at all. I really genuinely do think that I was a very average self-interested fourteen-year-old who had a particular goal and that, at the time, was I wanted to do very well in school. And it was so obvious to me because of how bad it was in terms of the phone interfering with my ability to focus to get work done, it was just glaringly obvious to me that I was like, alright, well then that was the big piece of glass in my hand and I’m just going to take it out. I don’t think it actually took a more complex mind for me to understand it at fourteen because in my particular instance, I guess the part that I was lucky was that I had a goal outside of social media that I could use as some sort of point of reference.

Whereas, if I, for example, didn’t have the particular goal of wanting to succeed in school, let’s say, and my goal was I wanted to be an influencer, let’s say, it would’ve been very, very difficult, it would’ve been very difficult for me to see that, hey, maybe I keep scrolling on social media. Maybe I’m not making as much content to move along my influencer dreams. So if it’s all within that bubble, but because it was outside, it was no, I need to have a physical worksheet that I’m not filling out because I’m on my phone. It was just much more obvious to me to see. So I don’t think I was above this Einstein IQ at the time to figure this out so early.

MO: Right. Well, not IQ maybe just wisdom. I mean, wisdom isn’t the same as IQ of course, but okay, I’ll take your word for it.

By the way, one of the funniest conversations I ever had with one of my children was when I was trying to explain that when I was a child, there was no job influencer that that’s a post-social media thing. We had celebrities and they were famous for being on TV shows, but there were not people who absent any other talent, were just influencers. They had trouble wrapping their mind around that.

So if people want to get off social media, obviously your website is appstinence.org, right? And they can read the interview with you at arcmag.org. But give us one step, give us a little taste, and a amuse-bouche. If you wanted to get off and you were going to do one thing to start yourself down the journey, what would it be?

GN: Change your hardware. Hardware, what I mean is change the physical types of technology that you use. And so the reason why I say that as my go-to answer is because I think a lot of the solutions that you’ll read sort of in fast news, quick articles or if any ironically Tiktoks and YouTube shorts, it’s about the right phone blockers, or it’s sort of about making it so that the apps on your phone are harder to find. It’s a lot of software changes. I genuinely do believe in changing the hardware, and this is for two main reasons. I think one is there’s a lot of research that shows that the importance of environment cannot be understated in behavior change, or trying to, for example, if someone is trying to eat better, the food that they keep in their house plays a huge role in the types of food that they eat.

I find that to be the same with the types of technology that you keep if you do not want to be addicted to your smartphone, not having a smartphone is a great solution. I do not think that it is an overcorrection, especially considering that in the long span of the life of the smartphone that I believe will be around for a very long time, relatively speaking, we’re in very primitive versions of the smartphone, it is going to get really, really, really convincing, far more than it was, and it already has. I mean, the 2007 smartphone versus even the 2016, 2017 smartphone is a completely different one in terms of how sort of sexy it is. So that would be the very first one that I would say, and there’s a lot of different ways you can go about that. I mean, there’s a growing market and I think coming from the Silicon Valley, I think I just have a sort of entrepreneurial idea about this, and that will solve some things, but it’s a growing market of what they call dumb phones. I personally don’t like to call it dumb phones. I call mine an intelliphone. There’s nothing dumb about my phone.

MO: I like that.

GN: Right? My dad came up with it. There’s a growing market for that, so if you want a more sort of expensive one, you can go for it. My first flip phone was $20. I think it was a Nokia that came out when I was a child, I think. So anyways, I started off with a $20 flip phone, and then I tried a more expensive one that was 60 something dollars, and then one that was a little more expensive than that, but changing the hardware, if you’re maximizing the gain for the littlest amount of, I guess, friction full change that you can make.

MO: Last question. You were raised Roman Catholic, I think you said you’re not so religious anymore, but one of the things that happens when you don’t have these social ties through social media and apps is that you oftentimes will go look for social ties through clubs, associations, the classic kind of bowling leagues, churches, league of women, voters, all this stuff that’s falling apart. Is there a part of you that, while not personally so religious anymore, looks to institutions like houses of worship, churches to replace what the smartphone has taken from us or to get us back to that? How do we think about the roles of various institutions in the process of getting away from social media?

GN: Even while I wouldn’t say that I prescribed any particular religion, if I’m thinking about the process of getting off social media from the most optimized way and maybe sort of two, say two clients being equal, but one of them was religious and had a religious institution to fill that space, and I had to bet money on which one would get there in a more comprehensive way. I would probably say the one who has a religious institution to go to, because there’s something anchoring about the gravitational pool of a religious institution that in a lot of ways mimics what social media pulls you into, which is sort of, social media feeds you a grand narrative about how the world works, right? Growing up religious, there’s also a grand narrative there as well. The idea of always feeling like you’re around people. When I would go to church every week, you were around people, and not only were you around people on Sunday, but being around people on Sunday made it that you had other social ties.

You then had to keep up during the week because then you would meet the family, friends, parents at church and their daughter’s having a birthday on Thursday, and so you go to, and then you sort of branch out naturally. Same thing with social media. If I wanted to be around people or feel like I was being around people, I would just open up my Instagram and I would feel like I would see the stories line up on the top, and you have feed. You kind feel like you’re in somewhat version of being around other people. So there’s these kind of parallels between engaging with a religious institution and being on social media that if you were to get off of it, it’s a good way to get off and whether or not ultimately think you’re religious, I think there’s other versions that can substitute it, but if we’re really getting to the topic of religious institutions in the role, there’s something materially different about telling someone fill the space with a religious institution versus finding a pickleball gym that you always go to. There’s just something, whether you are religious or not, I think we can agree that there’s something more multidimensional.

MO: We’re actually running a piece, an excerpt from a book pretty soon about CrossFit as a religion, which is something I’ve covered and I always find so interesting because the CrossFit people themselves will tell you often that it’s their religion. But that’s a conversation for another time. The first thing people should do is go read the interview with you at arcmag.org and go to your website, appstinence.org. Gabriela Nguyen, thank you so much for talking with me.

GN: Thank you so much, Mark. This is great.

MO: The podcast is hosted by me, Mark Oppenheimer, and I love feedback. Please write to me at mark.o@wustl.edu. The show is produced and edited by David Sugarman, audio consulting by Robert Scaramuccia, intern help by Caroline Coffey, our deputy head at the Danforth Center is Debra Kennard, and we have leadership from Mark Valeri and Abram Van Engen. Our music is by Love Cannon, web design by Cause+Effect online at causexeffect.com. Until next time, I am still Mark Oppenheimer.