There's no way I should be looking at my phone half as much as I do

Whenever I leave the house, I check my pockets to ensure I have three things on me:

• My car keys
• My wallet
• My iPhone

If you were to tell me I had to leave one of these things behind, I would put my wallet back in the dresser and make sure I wasn't in a position where I would need it. If you were to tell me I had to leave two of these things at home, I would immediately drop my wallet and car keys and unhesitatingly walk wherever I was headed.

This is both true and sad.

I look at my phone all the time. ALL. THE. TIME. I look it at while I'm standing at a urinal. Really, I do.

Because apparently I need to know 24/7 whether someone has commented on my Facebook status, whether my tweet has been favorited, or whether an extremely non-urgent work email has popped into my inbox in the past four minutes. And sometimes I just suddenly need to play an emergency game of electronic cribbage.

I cannot simply exist. I cannot just sit there and think. If there's a lull in a conversation or a break in whatever action I'm engaged in, I must fill in that time with phone browsing.

And most of the time, that's all I'm really doing: browsing. Just looking. Just checking to see if any life-changing information has come across my phone that I absolutely must know right this minute.

More than 99% of the time, I find nothing that couldn't have waited five more minutes. Or 10 more minutes. Or an hour. Or until tomorrow.

I am truly addicted, though it's not the phone itself to which I'm addicted. And it's not even the phone's output that has me hooked. It's the promise of finding something funny/interesting/uplifting/useful that drives me. Just that little bit of potential, rarely fulfilled, is enough to make me look at my phone every few minutes throughout my waking hours.

And I need to stop it. I know this. I need to stop it.

But that's so much easier said than done. I want to go back to a time when I could simply sit still for awhile and think. Or not even think. Just BE.

Yet I've lost the capacity to act that way. How? How did this happen? When did I and others like me lose the ability to be disconnected? I'd like to figure that out.

You don't know how close I just came to hopping on my phone to Google "phone addiction."