From my aisle seat on our two-hour flight, I glanced over occasionally at the passenger across the aisle as she went from texting on her phone, to flipping down the tray table and watching a news commentary show on her ipad, to switching to playing a game on her ipad, then finally folding up the tray table and texting on her phone for the final descent, landing, and taxiing to the gate, never spending more than a few seconds without interacting with a screen.
“Wow,” I thought, “That’s probably what I look like too.”
When we got home from the airport that evening, I checked the Screen Time app on my phone and realized I had, apparently, spent 2 hours and 27 minutes with my phone screen on that day. I had picked up my phone 70-plus times.
Is that a lot? Not that much? Below or above average? I googled it, and then realized I actually don’t care how it compares to anyone else’s phone usage. When I think of the holiday cards we send each other at the end of the year and summarize what we’ve been up to, i.e. “Parent 1 started a new job and ran a marathon, Kid 2 is taking tae kwon do lessons and making friends at kindergarten, et cetera,” I don’t want mine to read, “Brendan continues to pursue his passion, which is apparently looking at his phone for a huge chunk of his waking hours and not knowing why he’s doing it.”
Because yes, I use my phone for certain essential tasks, like maintaining a shared grocery list with Hilary, texting friends and family, taking photos, checking the weather forecast before I get dressed for my run, a few work things. But I am also aware—and have been aware for years now—that a lot of that screen time is spent on total bullshit: I pick up my phone to check the weather, and then I only half-consciously decide to watch three to 17 minutes of standup comedy video reels on Instagram, or get sucked into reading a news story and then another one and then another one.
Sure, I could download an app to help me spend less time on my phone. I could buy a product that promises to help me limit my distraction. I could get rid of my phone and get a “dumb phone.” Or, hear me out: I could just recognize that every time I pull my phone out of my pocket, it’s a conscious choice, and a choice that often results in me being a) not fully present or b) wasting several minutes of my life or c) both.
I have been through this before, as a person with a tendency toward addiction. I used to smoke, which, as you might know, has been proven to be dumb as shit, but also very addictive. And as a person who smoked 20 cigarettes every day for years, I’ll tell you: One of the worst things about it (besides all the obvious health stuff) was how often I thought about the next cigarette. Sure, smoking one of them took five minutes, but I probably started thinking about the next one 10 or 15 minutes after I finished the last one. Even if you don’t do the math, that’s a lot of thinking about something.
When I was in treatment for addiction 150 years ago, there was a saying that went something like, “First it’s just fun, then you have fun with problems, and then you just have problems.” A line graph of that might look like this:
I’m not going to compare smartphones to cigarettes or other addictive substances/habits (although I wouldn’t be the first person to do so). And I’m not saying my phone has caused the same problems I’d have with, say, heroin or alcohol. But maybe it’s worth asking: How much fun am I having?
Or: How much fun am I missing out on when I’m on my phone? Maybe you can multitask (even though the data says you probably can’t), but I know this about myself: Every minute I’m looking at my phone is one minute I’m not fully present doing something else: having a conversation, playing with my kid, listening to a song, watching a movie, enjoying a cup of coffee.
I have drunk thousands of cups of coffee in my life and hopefully will be able to drink thousands more, so I’m not that bothered by being a little distracted when I do that, but my kid is only going to be three years old once, and even the most boring thing he does is worth being there for.
So the day after that flight, I decided to try to keep my screen time under one hour per day—an arbitrary number, but one that seemed prudent enough. Could I fit in all the weather forecasts, texting, photos, grocery listing, social media, banking, and other essential phone tasks I needed in 59 minutes a day?
Well, I did. Every day for two months, I kept my phone screen time under an hour (except for two days when I went over by four minutes). I did not feel a significant transformation, write a novel, get shredded, learn a new language, or start playing the piano. I don’t even know what I spent that extra time doing. I just felt a little bit … more sane? Better?
When I sat in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, I just stared at the clock for seven minutes. I went out to dinner with a friend, and when he went to the restroom, I just sat there with my phone in my pocket. I have tried to embrace what it feels like to just sit there, instead of checking the little slot machine in my pocket whenever I’m the least bit bored.
I have quit many addictive things over the years, and in every case, I have found it much easier to completely eliminate whatever it is from my life instead of trying to moderate my usage of it. I am aware that people can drink just one beer or one glass of wine, or smoke a cigarette now and then, but I am not one of those people. The hard thing with a phone is that you can’t just get rid of it—or at least I can’t, at this point in my life. So I have to figure out a way to moderate it. Which I honestly kind of hate. But maybe this is a little bit of progress.
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