It slowly dawned on me that, vis-a-vis the smartphone, we cannot pretend to be fully rational adults with free will. I was addicted, of course. And if a system is designed to hijack your attention, the solution isn’t more heroic self-discipline. Ideally, big tech would be regulated: dopamine taxes, limits on algorithmic addictiveness, the whole package. But until that world exists, I needed a personal version of structural change: parental controls.