Know your enemy
The kids aren't the only ones with a screen problem
In the post-Haidt world, where the ideas of The Anxious Generation have frightened parents into delaying their kid’s first phone, the parents often forget to a look at their own screen time.
Kids - and especially teens - whose average daily screen time (ADS) is outrageous, have taken all the heat as of late, with bans and limits falling down on them like rain.
These are all good things. But the conversation tends to ignore all the people passing the bans and limits, offering them a sort of societal immunity because they are adults, many of whom are also racking up an ADS just as high - or sometimes higher - as the kids.
In the Space in Between, my system of adding more intentionality to life, there are six Truths I find essential and two of them are at play here: openness and time.
Openness, the backbone of a deliberate life, requires some deep truth, a hard looking at the self, and accountability. As adults read stories and books about the damage of screens on kids, they oft forget that their own Reels and Draft Kings time adds up quickly.
Enter time. We make our own definition of time based primarily on how we use time. The more I connect to the moment of doing something I choose to do, the less time matters. I find this holds for everyone. This is the idea of flow, scaled.
If you have an ADS off three or more hours, you are consistently removing yourself from your day - consciously disconnecting from the Path. And that makes it harder and harder to have a healthy relationship with time.
I know. You need it for work. You need it to check on relatives. There is always a reason to grab the phone.
Step back. Take a breath. Re-think how and why you use your phone. Be open to the truth.
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No writer has more eloquently tackled the deeper philosophical issues around the attention economy than Jenny Odell. She has written two books which challenge the common narrative that we need our phones to live a purposeful life.
What’s helpful to me in this conversation on adult phone use is her ability to shift the conversation away from the phone to the “attention economy,” which creates a wider net and allows her to focus more on time rather than screens.
In How to Do Nothing, she defines “doing nothing” as “disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.”
Many other thinkers, like Cal Newport, are arriving at this party now. It’s never been the phone. It’s the time. Social media companies figured this out way before any of us even knew there was a party. They saw the phone - like a cigarette - as the vehicle. Except they weren’t delivering anything. They were siphoning off our attention, bit by precious bit.
And we all just hand over our time, day after day.
We see the danger for the kids. But what about all that time we freely send them each and every day?
Take a few minutes this week and reflect on your screen time. Ask yourself: What could I have done last week with X (insert your own ADS)? Can you spend an hour today with an activity that isn’t monetizing you in some way?
When you are immersed in any passive activity, you cannot be open to the moment. You have handed your attention to something else. This creates a disconnect from your consciousness. You literally miss the path right in front of you.
And, as Odell smartly notes, it’s impossible to have an intelligent conversation about the attention economy as one of the primary modes of communication is via the attention economy.
“It’s a a cruel irony that the platforms on which we encounter and speak about these issues are simultaneously profiting from a collapse of context that keeps us from being able to think straight,” she writes.
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Put your phone away for a bit today and do nothing, taking what monk and writer Paul Loomans calls a breather, something that “doesn’t require you to think.’
“Because it’s precisely during those moments when the brain is left in peace and doesn’t have to do anything for a while that your subconscious can emerge into the space that’s been created and offer its suggestions and conclusions,” he writes in I’ve Got Time.
By disconnecting we reconnect to ourselves.
The best way to begin a healthier relationship with your phone involves two steps. First, starting doing other things - things you love - with your time. Second, reframe the way you think of your phone.
In his book Things That Matter, Joshua Becker argues that distractions like phones stop us from going out and doing the things we truly want to do. “Things get in the way. The enemy of intentionality and a life well lived is distraction. Know your enemy.”
It’s easy to see why most people choose to settle for the quick hits of dopamine, because to make the effort and invest in organizing the life, resisting the consumer culture, building some defenses and trying to have a logical and decent life is a lot.
But an intentional life requires effort. And patience.
So slow it down.
Sit with the discomfort. Challenge your own screen use.
Know your enemy.