How To Build A Healthier Relationship With Your Phone

Speaker 1 · 0:00Welcome everyone. Really happy to introduce someone today whose work feels incredibly aligned with our times that we're living in. Jay Vajarthy is a mindfulness teacher, designer, and technologist and author who brings a really unique and much needed perspective to this space. He's taught at NYU, contributed to widely used mindfulness technologies like Muse and the Healthy Minds program, and spent years exploring how we can live with more presence and intention in a world that's constantly competing for our attention. He's the founder of Still Ape, which is the world's first UX design studio focused entirely on mindfulness, compassion and well-being. Through StillApe, Jay and his team helped design and build digital experiences from apps to AI tools that actually support human flourishing rather than quietly working against it. They've helped shape dozens of products used by millions of people, all with the intention of bringing more awareness and care into the way technology is created and experienced. His book is something I genuinely appreciate and recommend. It's thoughtful, practical, and deeply relevant, especially for those of us navigating the tension between mindfulness and our phones. It's been widely recognized with praise from voices like Jack Cornfield, Ariana Huffington, Daniel Siegel, Shinzen Young, Richie Davidson. The list goes on, all saying that this is a book made for our times and that it's incredibly important. And they're all pointing to the importance of this work in helping us build a healthier relationship with our attention, with Jay as a pioneer of this work. Jay's work feels very real. Um, it meets us in the middle of our modern life. It offers a way to relate to our attention and our technology in our lives with more clarity, awareness, and choice rather than feeling like we have to choose one or the other. So for those of us who care about mindfulness, not just in our own lives, but in how we share it with others, I think his perspective is incredibly valuable. So, Jay Vidyarthi, I'm really glad that you're here. Thank you for being with us. And I'm really looking forward to learning from you today.

Speaker 2 · 3:02Thanks for

Speaker 2 · 3:03having me. I thought we'd maybe open up with a short silent practice, mostly because the incredible amount of self-conscious awareness that arises when listening to someone read your bio means that I need it as well. But let's just take a moment settling into whatever position feels appropriate, comfortable, alert, relaxed. And all we're gonna do for the next two minutes or so is something that's getting harder and harder to do in the modern world, which is nothing. We are just gonna let go of any effort, whatever that means for you.

Speaker 3 · 3:43Everything I say is an invitation, but the invitation here is to drop the effort, drop the need to fix anything, drop the need to check on anything, drop the need to change anything about your experience, giving yourself the permission to accept the moment exactly as it is. You may find yourself naturally gravitating to a certain practice that you're familiar with. Let that happen. You may find sounds in your environment or light or body sensations pulling you away. Let them pull you away, no effort to change anything. And as we transition back to our session, just carrying this sense of dropping the effort forward, coming back into our session with an effortlessness and an ease that may be a little different from a few minutes ago. And take a breath and we'll get started.

Speaker 2 · 5:23All right.

Speaker 2 · 5:24Thanks for joining me, Matt, and thanks for the lovely intro, Sean. I really appreciate it. Yeah, we are gonna be talking about technology, and we can bring awareness right now to the fact that this entire conversation is mediated by technology. And there'll be people listening to a recording through the magic of the digitization of technology, the vibrations that are coming out of my mouth are being transduced by a microphone, turned into data, sent in packets, broken down into quantized packets, sent through the ether. It's pretty wild. And sometimes we forget to take a second to realize just like what a wild thing that is, that it's part of our lives. There's another thing about this too, which is the conversation about technology right now can spin into the attention economy and the challenges with social media and AI and polarization and mental health concerns. But it's easy to also forget that we just took a couple of minutes to use technology to ground ourselves in effortless presence as well. And we these do so in many contexts when we use a meditation app or we find the teachings of a wise teacher. So technology is confusing, to say the least. A little bit about where I'm coming from on this. So I grew up sort of in tension between two worlds. So as a kid, I was raised by my parents. My father was very curious and had computers around the house. We had game consoles, I was super into video games. I started tinkering with the computers, learning how to download music and images on the early internet, building my own websites. And you know, I was thinking about it this morning. It's funny, like I think when I was like 14 or 15, I had like a pseudonym online, which I remember to this day. It was Arcana. So I guess I was into magic or something. And I remember I hand-coated a website and it was called Orkana's Domain. All I did on it was I was just like, here's some of my favorite things. Here's a picture I like. It was just this early innocent tool of just putting yourself online. And I remember I would use those early messenger apps to like when I was like 17 or whatever, try to like flirt with girls and like connect with my friends. And I would play video games online. It was very laggy. It's weird to think like this all seems very quaint now compared to the modern internet, where social media, you're not just putting a website out to be like, here are my favorite things. It's like this weird competition of reputation and engagement. And we want to get those hearts and those likes. And video games, not always but often, are like extremely violent, extremely competitive, extremely addictive and twitchy. Like you're just smashing those gems and getting those bonuses in every category of technology. Things have changed quite a fair bit. It's the largest industry in the world. We can't ignore that fact. It's a multi-trillion dollar industry, not to mention news media and

Speaker 2 · 8:20politics and how that's being influenced by the modern technology and the internet. But here's the interesting thing like when I started to come out of my teenage years and discover more deeply the practices of meditation, which had been a part of kind of my family heritage, but like most kids, I just rolled my eyes at what my parents did. But as I started to emerge from that and realize, oh, life is hard and sometimes feels meaningless. And these practices are something that actually are quite useful and practical to feeling okay in the modern world. I spent a lot of my adult life torn between these two worlds because I started to work in technology. I work as a designer, eventually, like working on tech products and websites and apps and designing things, working with digital teams, a lot of email, a lot of project management software. At the same time, I wanted to go on these silent retreats and disconnect from everything. And I didn't have the words for it at the time, but I felt like I had to hide a part of myself when I was in meditation circles. Like it felt weird to be around a bunch of mindfulness teachers and wellness people and say, I love video games. Right? There was this feeling already then, and now it's even deeper, which we're gonna get to. But there's this feeling among the wellness and mindfulness crowd and the teachers like this community, that technology is like bad. You shouldn't be on your phone. You're wasting your time. All this technology is eating the world and it's destroying society. And like different people have different variations of this, but there's a general sense. The opposite is also true though, because if I went to my colleagues, especially before I worked in the mindfulness space, just a regular tech company, and I was like, hey, I'm gonna take a week off. How interesting that if I said, I'm gonna take a week off to go sit by myself or with a group of people in silence on a mountain somewhere and pay attention to my breath and like scan my body, people would look at me like, what are you doing? But if I told them, oh, I'm gonna fly to South America on a beach and drug myself incessantly and like party, that's the norm. Both those things are fun. I'm not judging any of them, but it's just like interesting how we don't always see the fish that doesn't know the water they swim in. Like we don't see that there's a certain orientation to the hegemony and culture. And the reason I think I'm here talking about this and writing a book and stuff like that is not because I'm anywhere close to as wise as a lot of the people on this platform, but because none of them are talking about video games and about technology and about all these things. And I'm living in this intersection where I have been hiding parts of myself and therefore been forced on this journey through my mindfulness practice to form a healthy relationship with technology because I'm not going to abandon it. It's something I love. I'm curious about. It's my work. You know, I still do play video games. I play video games with my seven-year-old son. So, how do we reconcile these forces?

Speaker 2 · 11:11And that's really kind of the crux of this, because the reality is we do live in an attention economy where, as Sean mentioned at the beginning, the forces at play in our society are always competing for attention, including forces related to mindfulness and well-being. Basically, every content creator, every political party, every corporation, every app designer, they monetize attention. I mean, not to mention media outlets. The more attention that can be harvested from the masses, the more not only can we directly profit off that by, for example, selling advertising. But you might ask, why can I profit off that? Because, as we know, as mindfulness practitioners, that attention can be used to influence behavior. It can influence purchasing, it can influence voting. And these are the things that run our society. This is capital economics politics. Like, this is where value is. 2000, 3000 years, some of our most respected philosophers might have been talking about attention and about the value for our own well-being and the spiritual value of learning how to know where your attention is going and to be with awareness. We now live in a society where, like, that is an activist stance. That is a subversive act to say, I am going to make some intentional choices about how my attention is paid. That runs in counter to the large majority of the forces you face in your life that are like, no, we want to control what you pay attention to because we want to make sure you get your eyeballs on this ad, or we want to make sure that you vote a certain way, or that this headline feels like a crisis. So you click into it. We're swimming in an attention economy, and in the age of AI, the tools to harvest attention are only getting more powerful. And there's no reason to believe the incentive structures have been resolved to the point that it's not going to be used to further this situation. In fact, some scholars are starting to think about it as the attachment economy because when you engage with these AI bots, you actually start to form an attachment. And you may have experienced that a little bit. I certainly have, where you say thank you to the AI at first, and the next thing you know, you're talking about your marriage with the AI, you're talking about your life situations. And so, how do we navigate this level of confusion? It's just like, what are these technologies? There's clearly value in them. We're using them right now, yet there's clearly a huge entrenched world that it's connected to where things are spinning out of control. Wow. So let's just take a moment to just soak in everything I've shared there and just realize the predicament we're in, but also the opportunity. Because if you're listening to me now, you're interested in mindfulness and you know that not only is that an activist stance, but this particular discipline of mind is all about attention. So, what practice might be better suited for the attention economy? Is it a coincidence that more and more people around the world are growing interest in platforms like this, where we're talking about mindfulness, we're wanting to practice because people are looking for that space. And it's our job as teachers and people who share that to not shy away from the technology conversation and also not to demonize it, but to give people the tools to skillfully navigate it, just like the teachers before us taught us to skillfully navigate our emotions, navigate the world, navigate society. And what a wild reality that these thousand, two thousand, three thousand-year-old teachings are still so relevant. In fact, sometimes, in some ways, more relevant now.

Speaker 2 · 14:49So let's summarize and say there are some extreme views that we want to avoid when we are practicing and when we are teaching others to practice. One extreme view is, of course, the naive techno-optimism. Like, oh, technology is great, it's gonna save us, we'll never have to work again, it's gonna take care of all the jobs, and everyone's just gonna put their feet up, problem solve. Like that's pretty naive. And in fact, there's a whole sector of society who really do believe some version of that. The accelerationist idea. We just need to accelerate to the singularity and merge, upload our consciousness. Like this is sci-fi stuff, right? AGI is a big flash in the pan, artificial general intelligence, the AI is going to become our best ally. I think we have more than enough, like a hundred years of the industrial revolution, past 20, 30 years of the social media, to be a little bit skeptical of that claim, given the things we know about how technology is developed and the incentives of society. Now, the other extreme view, which is a little bit touchier for a crew of mindfulness practitioners and teachers, is I would believe it's an extreme view to also say that technology is evil or technology is bad or fundamentally a negative force in our society. And what we're talking about, the whole thing that I'm going to be talking about today, everything we're going to be sharing, it's about finding that middle way, or to take the Western philosophical turn, the golden meme, Aristotle's beautiful framing of virtue as a golden mean between two extremes, very much parallels, historical Buddha's middle way. And I think where all this high-minded stuff hits the ground is like as mindfulness practitioners, as teachers, the people we practice with, the students we work with, we live in this world. And

Speaker 2 · 16:34so to ignore it in your sharing is missing an important part. I would say that's like a generous interpretation because I'm also starting to realize there's a bit of a parallel. I talk a lot about the guilt, the shame, and the fear that we hold around our technology, right? We feel guilty for using it because it's supposed to be bad for us. We feel shame. Like sometimes we hide the fact that we use it, or we look at how much time we spent on screen, or our kids. We shame our kids for spending too much time on video games or whatever it might be. And then there's the fear. There's a lot of other thinkers in this space of digital wellness, like the Center for Humane Technology and the Digital Wellness Collective. And I love the work, I'm loving that. But the challenge is it's often presented in a way that makes people feel powerless and afraid. Like these big corporations are doing this to you. And we need regulators to get involved and we don't understand what's happening. All true, we definitely need all of that. We need science, we need regulators, we need better corporate tech ethics. But the part that that's sort of missing is the part that we know as mindfulness practitioners is that we are not powerless. In fact, all of this is happening in the space of our attention, and these practices give us a tool to actually manage that attention. So we need all of those things. The same way, like we needed societal movements about cigarettes and drunk driving, but we also needed individuals to stop smoking and tell their friends. And we needed someone to grab the keys and say, I'm sorry, bro, you're not driving home, right? Like it's the same thing. We need individuals to model this in our own life. And my whole thing around attention activism is that as mindfulness practitioners, we're uniquely suited to play that role, to see technology clearly, to avoid the guilt, shame, and fear-freeing. You know, if you think about the Abrahamic religions a couple thousand years ago, there was this interesting thing that happened where there was a lot of demonization of sexual behavior as an example. And there's many things we do have to be cautious about our sexual behavior and our urges and our cravings and our desire. But unfortunately, one of the side effects of the demonization of this is because we all feel those tendencies, it has led to a lot of guilt and shame because we are going to feel those urges anyway. And then they're going to kind of get displaced into problematic behaviors of other kinds. The Catholic Church has dealt with this a lot, right? Maybe I'll just leave that there. But I think there's an element that we're starting to do this in the mindfulness circle with technology, where people are coming to our practices, coming to our retreats, and maybe they're starting to get a whiff that like technology is bad and problematic, but ultimately they don't live on a mountain in a monastery. And so they come back home and there's emails to catch up on. And they haven't been given the frame. And that's kind of my goal today is to offer a little bit of that frame that we can avoid the promotion of fear, guilt, and shame, and instead practice ourselves to have a secure relationship with technology so that we can then share that

Speaker 2 · 19:36with others by example and also teach it directly. And one more thing on my initial comments here is I see a lot of people who are invested in mindfulness and wellness will sort of say things like, oh, I've given up my smartphone, or I deleted my Instagram account. I don't use TikTok, I don't go online with this sort of sense of pride of like, yes, we're disconnecting from all that. And I definitely support that in the same way I support a retreat. You need to retreat to manage your habits and connect them. At the same time, though, the majority of people are living a more and more digital life and now even engaging with AI a lot. I would also add to that that our wisest people need to be online, to show up online where people are, and ideally help steer the tech companies. When I think about it, I'm like an elder millennial in terms of generational, and I think about my generation and I think about Gen Z who are following kind of on my heels here. Our mindfulness teachers need to engage with the technology, both as users to learn how to have a relationship with it to in order to teach that, but also to work on it. Because I think the promise of technology, can you imagine a world where we have tools as powerful as these AI bots, but they're tuned by your Sharon Salzburg's, your Jack Cornfields, your Sebonet Solassis, your Jeff Warrens of the world who are guiding this technology. That's the world that I want to live in. And, you know, it may happen after my demise, but I feel like our role is to sort of keep that tradition moving forward and reinterpreting it for the modern world the same way we are grateful for the people who've carried these teachings forward for thousands of years so that we may benefit from them.

Speaker 1 · 21:18Jay, thank you so much for sharing all that. It sounds like a very wise approach. I thought it was interesting how you were talking about how taking back control of our own minds feel subversive to the stream of demand for our attention from the outside world and all this noise around us reminded me of the Buddha's teachings on how mindfulness and some of these teachings go against the stream. He used the word subversive and it felt like kind of a cool thing to do. Like I'm subverting the man's control, and it felt like, oh yeah, I want to take back control. of my own mind. But the word subversive kind of felt like a cool thing with that word choice. It feels like a way to invite adopters of this on board. Is that like a significant theme in how you introduce this? Yeah, I'm just kind of curious about that. It feels like a wonderful like strategic word choice. I don't know.

Speaker 2 · 22:26Yeah. For me, I use the term attention activism. That's sort of the term that I define in the book as a name for not only the mindfulness practitioners, but anyone who is working in some way. So for example, I would describe ad block as an attention activist tool. It's not necessarily created by mindfulness practitioners. I'm trying to create a label for this growing movement where I see a connection across various streams that currently at least now I'm starting to see the term attention activism being taken up by some thinkers and media outlets, which has been very exciting. But like at the time of coining it 10 years ago, I was feeling like I'm seeing a pattern here and I'm seeing a pattern that's only going to become more important and relevant. And I'm not sure all of these people realize that this is what they're doing. And to bring it to the mindfulness, I'm not sure the mindfulness movement sees that first infinite wave of mindfulness, all the spiritual traditions from around the world, different forms of mindfulness that came from the Abrahamic religions and the Kabbalah and the Sufis and Buddhist and Hindu and all of them. Then there's this like past 50 to 70 years second wave of like John Kabatzin introducing MBSR into the medical system, scientific replication, Dr. Richie Davidson coordinating mind and life with the Dalai Lama and becoming this second wave it's like, hey, mindfulness is actually an intervention for well-being and mental health and purpose and happiness. And I'm like, I think there's a third wave emerging which is it's not as simple as like, you know what, maybe I don't need to think so much or work so hard. It's almost like a price of admission for well-being in the modern world because if you are mindless, there are a bunch of very aggressive forces that are going to try and direct you in certain ways and basically take your authenticity away from you. So I'm not thinking strategically in terms of attracting people as much as I'm just, this is what it is. This is the world that we live in to know where it came from. I started my career in design and the specific part of the design process that I was doing was something we would call user research or human-centered design where you are observing people interacting with technology and using that research to make the technology better. And so I'm doing that job on the surface but as a human being I'm spending a lot of time watching people interact with technology. At the same time I'm like going through my own journey with mindfulness. And I was like, oh wait a minute the way people are talking about their technology, it's nothing more than an accurate assessment of mindfulness's role in the 21st century is subversive. I'm glad you think it sounds kind of cool and attractive, but it captures an action orientation that I think TikNot Han started speaking about when he spoke about engaged Buddhism. It's like an action orientation like we need to get together and figure this out or the world is just going to become more and more mindless. And I think for mindfulness circles in particular, the response I've gotten is very much like oh yeah, we actually need to help people navigate technology. It's not as simple as telling them to log off.

Speaker 1 · 25:34Yeah. Thank you for sharing all that I love how you approach all that