Personally I suspect a lot of phone addiction is that reality is full of boring things of little importance that we are bound to from above. Just like anyone would prefer doing something to sitting in a dark cave alone.
(Granted skinner boxing is an issue that affects some more than others.)
What is considered functional is shaped by the environment and successes - including norms. Greek Heroes have a different name now in most cases - psychopaths. Oedipus has a funny case of major values dissonance.
Now people would consider him guiltless for marrying his mother because he didn't know and may have been enslaved by destiny but consider him guilty for killing his father over road rage essentially but not because he was his father. No shit one's actions of killing random people for petty reasons will come back to bite them! It is Shakespeare in the bush of interpretations essentially.
>I suspect a lot of phone addiction is that reality is full of boring things of little importance that we are bound to from above
That's certainly a good excuse to start some low-effort dopamine releasing habit, but an issue is that we're driven to them even when the reality around us is interesting, and it prevents us from engaging in that reality or developing an interest in it which works against us.
I like to bring up a sense of longterm/after-the-fact fulfillment in these discussions as a gauge of how to spend your time now. I think it's a more or less uncontroversial way to go about life. It's easy to say "well, any time spent having fun is not time wasted" but that fails when it comes to maximizing fulfillment and minimizing regret.
Playing Fortnite on my phone might give me the biggest dopamine release right now and be instantly fulfilling compared to meeting the person next to me sitting at the beach or going for a swim in the crystal clear water. To link it back to something you said, it's a habit I would've developed under more boring scenarios.
But in weeks, months, or years, I know that seizing the opportunity of the beach or meeting someone would be vastly more fulfilling than spending that time on the screen.
My fellow ex-gamer friends have similar lamentations: "I wish I'd spent that time doing anything else than playing all those games." I'd guarantee almost everyone here looks at their time refreshing Instagram/FB/Reddit and maybe even HN in a similar light.
In these comments people always like to point out the good things about screens, like how they learned to program that way. But I think "screen time" in these discussions is a stand-in for the easy way out, and things with screens are the most effective instant escape that humans have ever had. To point out that someone can spend 100% of their screen time doing something they won't regret is like pointing out a couch can actually be used to do tricep dips.
But consider, when I was teaching my friend's little brother Python (on a screen), he kept constantly pulling his smartphone out do something more interesting (in the short term) and was slapping his own wrist for having that habit and genuinely interested in learning to program. Something that is surely more fulfilling in a year than knowing what's going on in social media.
What is considered functional is shaped by the environment and successes - including norms. Greek Heroes have a different name now in most cases - psychopaths. Oedipus has a funny case of major values dissonance.
Now people would consider him guiltless for marrying his mother because he didn't know and may have been enslaved by destiny but consider him guilty for killing his father over road rage essentially but not because he was his father. No shit one's actions of killing random people for petty reasons will come back to bite them! It is Shakespeare in the bush of interpretations essentially.