Show caption ‘If you leave your phone alone for the requisite amount of time your tree will grow fully.’ Composite: Guardian Design Team Romesh Ranganathan’s midlife crisis I’ve found an app on my phone to help stop my addiction to my phone For my birthday, my family gave me a Lego me, complete with Lego phone Romesh Ranganathan Sat 26 Jan 2019 02.01 EST Share on Facebook

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I realised I had an issue with my mobile phone use when a friend started explaining the virtues of the Fast 800 diet and, while still engaged in the conversation, I pulled out my phone and ordered the book before they had finished their sentence. Two things immediately occurred to me, aside from the fact I was never going to read it.

First, buying things has become too easy. Not easy enough for Amazon, of course, which has made the impulse purchase its business model. You can’t visit the website without the front page first putting on lingerie, playing you your favourite R&B, and whispering things like, “This is what other people who like what you like have been ordering, Romesh. It’s just one-click ordering, Romesh. You know you want it, Romesh.” It’s too sexy.

In defence of my rudeness, this friend had approached me after spotting me on the same train station platform. I am increasingly of the opinion that such approaches should be declared socially unacceptable. If you see a friend in the distance, the etiquette should be that you wave and say nothing, saving any discussion or chat for those times when you have arranged to meet. Southern, which operates in my area, runs an apocalyptically bad service; the last thing I want is to have a chat about someone’s new extension while waiting for the Tannoy to announce that they’re replacing today’s service with piggybacks. I recently encountered an old school friend I hadn’t seen for years. Despite me doing my best to pretend I didn’t recognise him, he walked over to say hello. After some sparkling chat (him listing the names of people we went to school with), we felt compelled to sit together on the train. It was a 40-minute journey and we ran out of conversation after five. Ten minutes into our awkward silence I strongly considered telling him this was all his fault.

But the second thing that occurred to me after paying for my Fast 800 book, was that I have been addicted to my phone for a while now. For my most recent birthday, my family gave me a Lego me, and that Lego me was holding a phone. This is the modern equivalent of giving deodorant as a present to the smelly bloke at work. Still, I restrained myself from pointing out that Lego me was probably looking in Lego shock at his Lego bank statement after paying for all of the stuff his Lego children had wanted for Lego Christmas.

Their passive-aggressive gift worked, however. With a full grasp of the irony involved, I began looking on my phone for something to help me break the addiction. What I found was an app called Forest, which allows you to plant a virtual forest of trees, each of which grows throughout the time you spend off your phone. If you leave your phone alone for the requisite amount of time (you get to decide how long this is), your tree will grow fully; if you use your phone before then, the tree dies. It’s quite an unusual fix, but it works if you can prevent any children you know killing your trees for a laugh. A friend was impressed, and said it was a shame the app only ran to virtual trees – forgetting the intensive labour that would be required to plant a real tree every time somebody managed to stay off Twitter for an hour.