The smartphone can no longer be understood as a bounded tool. It inhabits the body in diffuse, quiet ways, hijacking attention, reshaping thoughts, inserting itself into the gaps of the day. It has settled into consciousness in a vague, backgrounded way, withdrawing from scrutiny by doing its job too well, revealing itself only in moments of friction, failure, or absence. As it retreats from awareness by virtue of its seamlessness, attention slips from conscious governance and becomes tethered to notifications and habitual checks, and boredom loses its urgency as it becomes no longer a signal to reorient but a gap to be immediately filled.

What I am interested in are the conditions that make inner life in a constantly tethered existence possible at all. There are spaces in the day where thought is meant to thicken, where memories consolidate and meaning naturally organizes itself. When these spaces are continuously interrupted, interiority becomes hard to access. The self is increasingly lived at the surface, constrained by what appears rather than what lingers and emerges from the mind. What happens when experience is persistently oriented outward rather than inward?

I plan to make this examination tangible by developing a conceptual map of attention that accounts not only for cognitive mechanisms but also for orientation. By bringing cognition into conversation with phenomenology, I hope to gather insights into what exactly is being eroded, how people attempt to recover it, and what it might mean to reclaim inner life in an environment that is structurally hostile to sustained inwardness.