Laura Kennedy: Yes, smartphone addiction is unhealthy – but so is getting a dumb phone and pretending it’s 2003

Few of us have a healthy relationship with our phones. Chatting with a writer friend recently, I realised that even the people rejecting the ubiquity of smartphones (and there aren’t many) are in that camp with the rest of us.

As we sat outdoors on a crisp autumnal Australian day, the sun hitting my back and its 23-degree heat calming my bones, she ruined everything.

“I got rid of my iPhone!” my friend said, staring at me over a cup of coffee with unsettling ocular intensity. The irises of both eyes were entirely ringed in white as her brows crept northward. She looked like a skittish horse being backed into a stall. “I’m not using a smartphone at all any more!”

Her voice ascended at the end of the sentence with a weird little laugh, like a panicked question she was putting to the universe. The whole thing had a sort of tremulous “I’m okay ... Am I okay?” tone that I found depressingly relatable.