YOU know the feeling. You're alone and all of a sudden you get the urge to check your phone.

Fifteen minutes later you can't really remember what you were originally doing but you've just looked through all your ex's Instagram pics and you haven't achieved a thing.

As The Atlantic magazine once put it, your brain was in "machine mode". Some people have started to push back against that including comedian Louis CK, who revealed his powerful philosophy about smartphones on Conan O'Brien's late night TV show.

Initially explaining why he would not purchase the devices for his children, CK said:

"I think these things are toxic, especially for kids. It's this thing. It's bad. They don't look at people when they talk to them. They don't build the empathy."

"Kids are mean and it's because they're trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, you're fat. Then they see the kid's face scrunch up and say 'ooh, that doesn't feel good'.

"But when they write they're 'fat', they go, 'hmm, that was fun'".

CK also discussed what we all secretly know about smartphones ... they are keeping us from the business of just 'being'.

"The thing is you need build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away," he said.

"Is the ability to just sit there like this," he said, sitting idle on set. "That's being a person, right?"

"You know, underneath everything in your life there's that thing, that emptiness - forever empty, you know what I'm talking about? The knowledge that it's all for nothing and you're alone, you know, down there.

"Sometimes when things clear away, you're in your car and you go, 'oh, no, here it comes that I'm alone'. Like it starts to visit on you, just this sadness.

"Life is tremendously sad just by being in it. And so you're driving and then you go, oh, that's why we text and drive.

"I look around and pretty much 100 per cent of people driving are texting. And they're killing - everybody's murdering each other with their cars.

"But people risk ruining their own and taking a life because they don't want to be alone for a second.

CK then told of his own experience reaching for the phone while driving to the tunes of heartland rocker Bruce Springsteen.

"So anyway, I started to get that sad feeling. I was reaching for the phone. (Then I went) you know what, don't. Just be sad.

"Just let the sadness stand in the way of it. And let it hit you like a truck.

"I let it come and Bruce - and I started to feel - oh, my God. And I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch.

"I cried so much and it was beautiful. It was like this beautiful - it was just this - sadness is poetic.

"You're lucky to live sad moments. And then I had happy feelings because when you let yourself feel sad your body has like antibodies.

" You have happiness rushing in to meet the sadness. I was grateful to feel sad and then I met it with true profound happiness.

"It was such a trip, you know? The thing is because we don't want that first bit of sad, we push it away with like a little phone ..."

That's not something CK will let happen to his children.

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