The Mirror in Your Palm

We reach for the glow before we reach for ourselves.

The first gesture of morning is not breath, not thought, but thumb. A flick, a scroll, a gaze into the blue-lit mirror. There we are—not as we are, but as we hope to forget ourselves.

We call it distraction. But distraction implies there’s something worth being pulled from. What if the scroll is not a diversion—but a refuge? Not a mistake, but a ritual?

This isn’t about habit. Habits are predictable, mechanical. Addictions are something else. They are spiritual. And what we are addicted to is not content, not dopamine, not the news or the feed or the likes. What we are addicted to is anesthesia. The holy numbness of disconnection. The shield against that slow, crawling feeling of being awake.

It’s too easy to blame technology. The phone is a tool, a portal, a vessel. It reflects. It doesn’t create. And what it reflects is the quiet terror of sitting still with one’s own mind. The fear that without stimulation, we might have to confront the emptiness we’ve paved over with noise.

Because what happens when we put the phone down?

Silence. Space. Memory. Regret. All the slow things begin to surface. The relationships we neglected. The dreams we buried. The choices we justified. The solitude we’ve mistaken for loneliness. There is no app to buffer that weight.

So we return. Scroll. Tap. Refresh. Not for connection—but for distance. Not for information—but for forgetting.

This isn’t new. Before screens, there were bottles. Before bottles, there were books. Before books, there was idle gossip. The medium shifts. The motive does not. We are not seeking distraction; we are fleeing confrontation.

And the most terrifying confrontation is the one with ourselves.

The unfiltered, unoptimized, uncurated version. The parts that don’t perform. The ones that don’t fit into narratives or bios or brand identities. The child we left behind. The adult we never became. The aching in-between we pretend isn’t there.

Perhaps we are not losing focus. Perhaps we are losing the courage to feel.

And maybe the real addiction isn’t to the phone—but to escape itself. A quiet, relentless craving to outrun our own reflection.