Catherine Price opens by examining how smartphone and app design deliberately exploits known psychological vulnerabilities — variable reward schedules, social validation triggers, fear of missing out — to maximize user engagement time, often at the expense of genuine user wellbeing.

Why understanding this deliberate design matters:

• Recognizing that excessive phone use often results from deliberate psychological engineering, rather than purely personal willpower failure, removes some unwarranted self-blame while providing more accurate understanding of the challenge
• This understanding motivates the book's subsequent practical guidance for actively countering these deliberately engineered engagement mechanisms
• Price's approach, grounded in behavioral psychology research, provides substantive foundation for its subsequent practical digital wellness guidance

This opening establishes the book's foundational understanding of smartphone design's deliberate psychological engineering, motivating its subsequent practical guidance for addressing problematic phone use.