The online PE teacher Joe Wicks has announced, in a fit of self-reproach coinciding with the launch of his new television programme, that he considers himself addicted to his smartphone. He says he forced himself to take a whole five days off social media in order to be more ‘present’ for his children, and that doing so ‘opened my eyes to just how much I struggle with it on a daily basis’.
‘I justify the use of my phone for work,’ he said in a post on Instagram (I won’t labour the irony, but he really did deliver this revelation in a post on Instagram), ‘but in reality I’m probably 30 per cent productive with it and actually helping my community and 70 per cent of the time I’m just consuming mindless content, distracting myself, getting triggered and annoying myself, eternally scrolling and just avoiding something else.’
None of that sounds like a bad thing to me at all.
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