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Addiction to screens has been part of society's concerns for a few years now, but it seems like an issue far from being resolved. Mainly in Brazil, where surveys such as the one carried out by the Datareportal platform indicate that Brazilians spent 7.5 hours a day last year counting only social media.
Lawyer and professor Ronaldo Lemos, creator of Marco Civl da Internet, points out another statistic: a Brazilian average of over 9 hours of daily cell phone use, the second highest in the world.
"When we reach the end of our lives, many people can put on their tombstone: 'Spent 28 years in front of their cell phone'", he says
He released the book O Monge, o Yogue e o Fakir: Corpo, Coração e Mente no Tempo das Máquinas (publisher Todavia), based on the experience of a burnout that resulted in depression in the mid-2000s, the time when he was writing the text of the civil landmark.
Lemos uses classic archetypes from different traditions to talk about technology capturing our attention.
At 50, he said the book is also a reflection on how he will teach his three-year-old son to deal with technology, especially artificial intelligence.
See below the interview given to BBC News Brasil. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.
BBC News Brasil - What do the figures of the monk, the yogi and the fakir, in the title of your book, represent within our relationship with technology?
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Ronaldo Lemos - These three archetypes appear in basically all cultures. It is a way of mapping our inner life: the monk represents the heart, which has to do with feelings, emotion, devotion.
The yogi is our mind. Many people remember yoga poses. The yogi represents learning, solving problems with our mind.
And the third archetype is the body archetype, which is the fakir, which became famous in the 19th century when European visitors visited India and met people who had very impressive physical discipline.
The path of the fakir is also a path of transformation. These people who had this physical discipline didn't want to look beautiful, fit, or slender. They wanted to be a better person.
Why are these three archetypes useful today? Because we live in a world captured by technology. It captures our body, our heart and our mind and keeps distracting and attracting each of them, so that, instead of them being paths of transformation, they become paths of capture.
Many people end up reacting only to stimuli that come from outside. So the book is a manifesto in defense of strengthening our inner life, especially at a time when technology tends to capture everything, including our inner life. And in my view, if we recapture our inner life, we will be much better prepared to use technology to our advantage and not be used by it.
BBC News Brasil - How is your screen consumption? How do you control usage?
We read - I'm not an enlightened person who has already overcome all this. I'm just someone who lived through the collapse and had to deal with it. I was in the middle of building the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, 100% immersed in that process and, one fine day, I collapsed.
I started having to deal with panic, with depression, I couldn't do anything else. Interestingly, to get out of this state, I started running.
It was like a reaction, because it wasn't something thought out. And initially I ran five minutes a day, because I had no preparation, and suddenly, within a week, I was running 70 kilometers without even thinking about it. Why? Because, when I ran, that physical pain erased the existential pain. That relieved another pain that was permanent.
I deal with technology every day. And I have to seek this balance every day of my life. And there is no guarantee that I cannot experience the same breakdown, that the imbalance can be reestablished again, that I cannot have a new burnout.
The only difference is that, when this challenge arrives, there will be someone more capable of looking at everything from the outside, who I call the "Chariot Master" in the book and who says: "Look, this is happening. So let's go this way." At least the route of what to do, for me, was clear.
Again, I'm no different than anyone else, I have to deal with this every day. In fact, several days I wake up and say, "Wow, I'm out of balance, I spent a lot of time in front of a screen. What am I going to do? Am I going to exercise? Am I going to do a religious ritual? Am I going to spend time in the company of other people? Am I going to do charity work? Am I going to read? Am I going to write a text like a diary?"
But the key point is that enlightenment is not just about making great sacrifices. It is in us seeing things as they are and trying to live in a simple way, in a way that is not something that diverges from our nature.
BBC News Brasil - The digital architecture of social networks is compared to the randomness of casinos and slot machines. Screens stimulate dopamine as a form of capture. How can we resist these attractions?
We read - You always want dopamine to keep you on edge, to deal with that desire that appears all the time. This idea speaks directly to the heart, this is a capture of the heart. The algorithm is this emotional roller coaster that keeps offering you moments of extreme joy, sadness, disappointment, frustration, anxiety. All this in 10 minutes. Anyone who watches short videos has this experience. Every two or three seconds, a completely different emotion is presented there.
We live in a world of intermittent rewards. As they don't appear all the time, they are designed to have this randomness, this makes you keep coming back to the platform all the time, because your feed brings a lot of things that are OK, then suddenly it brings something incredible.
So this speaks to the heart, this is a way of capturing your heart, which is that you make those efforts and, suddenly and randomly, you eventually receive something that is interesting.
So what is your behavior? Keep going back there all the time. That's why so many people wake up and what is their first impulse? It's putting your hand on your side to pull out your cell phone, because you're waiting for that cycle to start again.
So, the book starts from this question and says that it is possible to train the heart to break this cycle that is happening. Just like you train your muscle, like you study to learn something. These are exercises to see habits and, from there, seek how to retrain the heart so that it is once again capable of gratitude, compassion, benevolence, which are pillars of human existence and which technology erases.
If you stay on your cell phone all day, you forget to be grateful, you forget to be a person who is capable of exercising compassion, you put aside any idea of benevolence. People today complain that we live in big cities and people are cold, they don't care about each other.
It's not that: it's just that everyone is captured by their cell phone.
BBC News Brasil - Has the focus of our attention, where it is directed, become a fundamental theme of our times?
We read - If you went to a 19th century fakir and said "in the future people will spend 9 hours and 13 minutes every day looking at the same object", which is the screen time here in Brazil, the second highest in the world, this fakir from the past would say "ah, you're kidding me. What kind of physical discipline will the person of the future have to look at that same object every day, for the rest of their life?"
And today that is a fact. When we reach the end of our lives, many people can put on their tombstone: "He spent 28 years in front of his cell phone."
What is happening? You can only spend 9 hours and 13 minutes a day looking at a screen because you are being anesthetized. The body receives anesthesia that arrives through the mind and heart.
Anyone who spends nine hours a day in front of their cell phone returns to the devastated world, with a parched heart and a completely clouded mind, with an inability to connect with others. Exhausted.
You intuitively know that you spent the most precious thing in life, your attention, on something completely useless. The result of this? You feel bad. It's very different, for example, from sitting in front of a person and having a conversation with them, having an exchange, paying attention to them and them paying attention to you.
Attention is a double-headed arrow: the person will feel good because they will receive something very precious, which is your attention. And you will feel good.
Because in that conversation that you dedicated completely to that other person, even if for a short period of time, you performed a very noble human activity. It gives you a joy to exist, to live, because you did something that is genuine, legitimate and involves exchange. And this exchange does not exist with the machine.
BBC News Brasil - But do you think achieving this is possible even for professionals in the new economy, such as app delivery people, who face more obstacles and who depend on their cell phones to work during long hours?
We read - Many people use technology to survive. It depends on WhatsApp. Many people need to be a monk, fakir or yogi involuntarily to live, because the person's survival depends on that state, not because they are in a process of personal transformation.
In a survey of nursing professionals, gratitude practices make a huge difference in the lives of many people. They saw that those who simply picked up their cell phones or did nothing to alleviate that exhaustion ended up in states of depression and burnout.
Those who worked on their own hearts, giving, for example, names to what you are feeling, seeking to understand, not judge and practice gratitude in the practice of work and even in life itself, you saw that these people had resilience and were much stronger.
In these situations where we are led to imbalances due to issues of inequality, the practice of seeking integration and seeking to rebalance the three archetypes is even more important. Because in these situations, you are always on the verge of imbalance. If you do nothing, if you just remain inertia, you end up experiencing the imbalance as if it were something natural.
BBC News Brasil - You recently became a father. How do you think about your child's education in the face of technology and the rooting of artificial intelligence in our lives, even establishing a relationship of dependence with users?
Lemos - I think schools could even change, because, in the world of artificial intelligence, training people to protect their inner lives, to strengthen themselves in the face of technology, becomes central. So, while schools don't change, I'm going to try to do this at home.
First thing: those who will use artificial intelligence best are those who grow up away from it. Anyone who grows up using artificial intelligence, in my view, will suffer from a problem which is that you pass your mental tasks onto artificial intelligence. This will generate dependence and will harm the formation of your repertoire.
The absolute majority of people will end up untraining their ability to think and form. So, in my view, those who use artificial intelligence best are older people. It breaks with the idea of digital natives, that young people are naturally more likely and skilled at using technology. This is not true for artificial intelligence.
Young people today are desperate and use AI very poorly. They take the first result from the AI and move on, they settle for whatever the AI says. This is a trap. AI is stealing your voice, it's stealing who you are. This point is important because, the more repertoire and training you have, the more prepared you will be for artificial intelligence.
At least for our son I will try. I know this is very difficult, that he only uses artificial intelligence from the age of 14, 15. Because that's the time he'll need, first, to be a person, to learn how to tie a shoe, to know where he is in the world, to know how he relates to other people. Delivering AI to a child who has not gone through these phases and these skills is completely counterproductive.
There is one aspect that we have to think about as a family, as a school, as an individual: we need to protect our inner life and strengthen ourselves in relation to these infinite pressures and stimuli that come from outside, against our will.
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